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Where are your best customers? (Maybe not on Facebook or Twitter!)

Where your customers are is an important question. As the articles below point out, nearly 25% of Americans still don't use the Internet. Only about half use Facebook and only 7% use twitter. That's why we at Atomic Ideas continue to bang the drum for starting with a sound strategy. Even the right message is wasted if you're not using the right media. Just because everyone else is using a specific medium doesn't mean it's right for your brand...or maybe it is! 

Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY]

February 24, 2011 by Jolie O'Dell195

 

A new report from eMarketer finds that most adult Americans with Internet access use Facebook at least once a month, and a full 42.3% of the entire American population was using the site as of this month.

By contrast, Twitter‘s penetration rate was much lower, sitting at around 7% of the total population and 9% of the Internet-using population, according to the report.

Late last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company saw around 250 million daily users of its 500 million-strong user base. The young exec made the point that Facebook’s products — including Photos, Places, Groups and Messages — are features that people use more frequently than they use other, more established services with similar features because Facebook’s products are inherently social.

Twitter, on the other hand, is driven largely by so-called power users, and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. Another interesting and related Twitter usage stat: 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.

One important stat to note, however, is Twitter’s year-over-year growth. Last year around this time, Twitter’s penetration rate was around 7%, and by the end of this year it’s expected to be at 11% for American Internet users, or 16.5% of the population that also uses other social networks. In terms of the overall U.S. population, the numbers are still small, but the growth is steady.

An analyst for the firm said, “eMarketer’s new Twitter usage estimates are lower than our April 2010 forecast. Since then, Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected.”

The microblogging service celebrated 100 million new accounts created in 2010, and a lot of that growth was due to the company’s investment in official and device-integrated mobile apps.

What do you think it’ll take for Twitter’s growth to really skyrocket and reach more of the population? Or will this service remain a niche product for the web-using elite? Let us know your opinions below.

TOP 20 COUNTRIES WITH THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF INTERNET USERS

TOP 20 COUNTRIES WITH HIGHEST NUMBER OF INTERNET USERS # Country or Region Population, 2011 Est Internet Users Year 2000 Internet Users Latest Data Penetration (% Population) World % Users 1 China 1,336,718,015 22,500,000 485,000,000 36.3 % 23.0 % 2 United States 313,232,044 95,354,000 245,000,000 78.2 % 11.6 % 3 India 1,189,172,906 5,000,000 100,000,000 8.4 % 4.7 % 4 Japan 126,475,664 47,080,000 99,182,000 78.4 % 4.7 % 5 Brazil 203,429,773 5,000,000 75,982,000 37.4 % 3.6 % 6 Germany 81,471,834 24,000,000 65,125,000 79.9 % 3.1 % 7 Russia 138,739,892 3,100,000 59,700,000 43.0 % 2.8 % 8 United Kingdom 62,698,362 15,400,000 51,442,100 82.0 % 2.4 % 9 France 65,102,719 8,500,000 45,262,000 69.5 % 2.1 % 10 Nigeria 155,215,573 200,000 43,982,200 28.3 % 2.1 % 11 Indonesia 245,613,043 2,000,000 39,600,000 16.1 % 1.9 % 12 Korea 48,754,657 19,040,000 39,440,000 80.9 % 1.9 % 13 Iran 77,891,220 250,000 36,500,000 46.9 % 1.7 % 14 Turkey 78,785,548 2,000,000 35,000,000 44.4 % 1.7 % 15 Mexico 113,724,226 2,712,400 34,900,000 30.7 % 1.7 % 16 Italy 61,016,804 13,200,000 30,026,400 49.2 % 1.4 % 17 Philippines 101,833,938 2,000,000 29,700,000 29.2 % 1.4 % 18 Spain 46,754,784 5,387,800 29,093,984 62.2 % 1.4 % 19 Vietnam 90,549,390 200,000 29,268,606 32.3 % 1.4 % 20 Argentina 41,769,726 2,500,000 27,568,000 66.0 % 1.3 % TOP 20 Countries 4,578,950,118 275,424,200 1,601,772,290 35.0 % 75.9 % Rest of the World 2,351,105,036 85,561,292 508,993,520 21.6 % 24.1 % Total World - Users 6,930,055,154 360,985,492 2,110,765,810 30.5 % 100.0 % NOTES: (1) World Internet User Statistics were updated for June 30, 2011. (2) Additional data for individual countries and regions may be found by clicking each country name. (3) The most recent user information comes from data published byNielsen Online, International Telecommunications Union, Official country reports, and other trustworthy research sources. (6) Data from this site may be cited, giving due credit and establishing an active link back to Internet World Stats. Copyright © 2000 - 2011, Miniwatts Marketing Group. All rights reserved.

 

 

The 2011 CMO's Guide To The Social Media Landscape.

With social becoming more and more important in the marketing mix, we thought this chart from cmo.com and 97th Floor presents a great way to quickly review the pros and cons of the top platforms dotting the landscape. You can download the PDF at cmo.com.

It's a tool that could be useful in developing an actual strategy for social media engagement... something we find is still strangely lacking in many companies efforts. Agree? Disagree? Let us know.

 

 

 

Want Gen X and Y to find Your Website? New Forrester Report.

For many companies, succesfully marketing to and engaging with Generations X and Y is essential to future business growth and success. Let's face it, someday all the seniors and Boomers (sadly, me included) will be gone. So it's important to stay on top of trends and research that helps us understand how the Xers and Yers will find us (and,of course, how we can find them).

A new report from Forrester Research provides some insight and statistics. The survey says that although natural search engine results and then referrals are still driving the most traffic, younger folks (not surprisingly) are increasingly using social chanels to find websites. 

Here are some stats and a nice chart from an article on the report at the fabulously informative MarketingProfs website. Read the full monty here.

      •  Some 16% of online adults are referred to websites via social channels.

      •  Among Gen-Y adults, nearly 30% find websites via social networking sites, while 25% do so via
         email from friends and family.

      •  Gen-Y adults are twice as likely to use blog posts and Twitter as referral sources:

      •  14% of Gen-Y adults are referred to sites via blog posts, compared with 7% of all adults.

      •  10% of Gen-Y adults are referred to sites via Twitter, compared with 5% of all adults.

 

One Small Tweet for Man

The first tweet from space was sent by a NASA astronaut on January 22. It was sent by flight engineer TJ Creamer:

"Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s"

And even though it was a simple message, it underscored the power of social media as viable tool to reach out to more segments of your audience. It also should be a wake-up call to companies who have been dragging their feet about incorporating Social Media into their marketing mix. They have just fallen even further behind in the cyberspace race. 

Listening to Who Really Leads

As companies move from focusing on quick sales to deeper customer relationships, there's a specific area that needs to be addressed.

The mother lode of information on how to improve your product offering in order to sell more stuff - firsthand customer feedback. Not a two-way mirrored room of paid focus group attendees. 

Your living, breathing customers and prospects.The voice(s) of your customer. 

There's been a mad rush to social media platforms, to find out what customers are saying about your company - the good, bad, and ugly. Monitoring online conversations is not that hard. Many services can automate that for you. 

The heavy lifting is when you look inside your company and examine any and all obstacles to the flow of customer information. If customer information drives business decisions (and shouldn't it?), anything that gets in the way of accessing this information should be eliminated. Get rid of any blockage to the flow of real-time customer insights. 

Let your customers be heard offline, and they'll have less to gripe about online. Quite often the online moaning is about a crummy, real-world experience.

Yes, it's much harder to improve your company's over-all customer service than to set up a Twitter monitor or Facebook page. But very much worth it. And it's proactive. By the time someone's tweeting about your company it's often a gripe, so you end up primarily doing damage control.

What if the complaint/concern was solved offline, in a timely, polite, personal way? What if anyone who comes in contact with your customers - billing department, receptionist, truck drivers - passed along the information they gleaned to your 'customer care' department? And the idea of having a 'Customer Care Officer' at companies worldwide is starting to catch on. There were 30 in 2003. Today there are over 300.

There needs to be an awareness that anyone who has any form of contact with a customer is in sales. And good salespeople are good listeners. Customers are talking now more than ever, and want to interact deeply with companies. Is everyone at your company listening closely and passing on what they hear? Gathering the unvarnished comments that can help you shape what/how you sell?

A new advertising truism in 2010 is that 'content is king', and who better to influence what content is written and then sent out to the many different media channels? Tailor content to match what the people buying your stuff are most interested in learning about.

What if customers told you what they wanted, and you respond accordingly? Your marketing will be more relevant, your company reputation will improve, your long-term customer relationships will increase. Nice benefits to listening and responding.

photo: mark emery  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Online and Social Tools - Have The Dems Forgotten How They Got To The White House?

Just over one year ago, Advertising Age named Barack Obama Marketer of the year. Everyone knows the story by now of how his team used online marketing and social media tools to literally blow away his competition. Nobody before him had ever done that and it turned the marketing of party and politicians upside down. You would think that would be memorable, especially to Democrats. Apparently, it's not.

As a new Advertising Age article points out, Massachussets Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley either forgot about or "Ignored Obama's Digital-Media Playbook." The facts that she's losing big-time and her opponent actually apparently owns a copy of Obama's playbook makes that an awfully big mistake.

The article does a great job of covering Ms. Coakley's "old-school" tactics versus Republican State Senator Scott Brown's aggressive Facebook, Twitter and YouTube efforts. And it really is truly is amazing that she didn't utilize any of the tools until the eleventh hour.

However, there is no mention of something I wrote about at the time Obama won the Marketer of the year award, the subject of his brand and how it shaped his victory. Without it, he may not have won: 

Obama and his team built a clearly-differentiated, consistent brand around their candidate and then utilized all the traditional and digital branding tools available to achieve their goals and humble the Republican party. In Fast Company, Keith Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide was quoted as saying, "Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand, new, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets."

Obama's "breakaway" brand characteristics.

Along with those three key attributes for Barack, Brand Obama had the following characteristics that every great brand has built into it's DNA:

1. A compelling creation story.
2. A charismatic, visionary leader.
3. A clearly defined, simple position that clarified their mission and purpose simply and easily for everyone... "Change." They never wavered, even in the face of adversity.
4. An iconic logo that clearly communicated their position and served as the foundation of their identity system across all channels.
5. Formidable enemies (non-believers - think Coke vs. Pepsi) to overcome, and reams of intelligence at their disposal to help hone strategy, determine weakness and take the fight to Hilary Clinton first and then John McCain and the entire Republican party.
6. A Belief System =  vision, values, trust, relevance, leadership. All great brands create a culture
   of belief.
7. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

At the end of the day, it is definitely not all about the tools you use market your message.

Martha Coakley's biggest mistake may be that she doesn't have a clearly defined, compelling brand strategy and message to elevate and differentiate her from Senator Brown's brand... the competition. If you don't have that, all the messaging and engagement tools in the world, traditional or digital, can't help you win.

20 Essential Twitter Tools For Business.

I subscribe to an essential tool for marketers. It's called marketingprofs. For a nominal fee you gain access to a phenomenal information resource and other goodies. For instance, today I was able to download a marketingprofs white paper on Twitter which includes 11 case studies of businesses using the platform and the extremely useful list below... $49.95 for the complete study to non-subscribers, FREE to me. Outstanding!

In the the spirit of the holidays I'm sharing. But if you want the rest of the info, I highly recommend you sign up at marketingprofs.com. You won't regret it.

Twitter Account Management

• TweetDeck: This popular desktop widget offers great functionality for posting business tweets, including the ability to sort tweets into direct messages, topics and keywords. For instance, you can set up a specific column for mentions of your company or industry, and another for those of your competitor. TweetDeck has a sleek Adobe Air interface that looks like a cockpit on your desktop. Plus, it integrates with Facebook.

• HootSuite: A fast-growing free Web service, HootSuite is perfect for businesses needing multiple Twitter profiles and multiple users. It allows you to easily schedule tweets and switch back and forth between accounts. The service also includes a URL-shortening service called “ow.ly” that lets you see how many times your links are clicked. HootSuite counts Google Enterprise, Steve Case and Threadless as users.

• CoTweet: Multiple people from the same company can communicate through a single Twitter account, thanks to CoTweet. Each person maintains his or her own profile and activity record. CoTweet boasts such customers as Macworld, Ford and Whole Foods. CoTweet is accepting private beta registration.

Contact Management & Directories

• FriendOrFollow.com: This is a powerful tool for seeing 1) which of the people you follow are following you back and 2) which people are following you, but you have yet to reciprocate.

• Twitoria: You may have a lot of followers, but how many of those are active? This simple application allows you to see which of your followers are active on Twitter over the last week, two weeks, month, two months, etc.

• WeFollow.com: It is a user-powered Twitter directory. Simply enter the tags you want to be known for (e.g. #socialmedia, #marketing, #measurement, etc.) and you’re finished.

• Twellow: This tool bills itself as the Twitter Yellow Pages. You can search for users by a wide range of categories. You can also add yourself to a group so people can find you.

• Just Tweet It: Another directory service that notifies you of new additions to people in your particular industry.

Tracking & Metrics

• TwitterCounter: This sleek tool lets you chart the number of followers over time, from last week to last month.

• Bit.ly: This incredibly useful tool not only shortens your URL but enables you to track metrics on how many people click on your links. This provides insight into what types of links resonate with your client base. Retailers, such as Dell, use bit.ly to track click-through rates.

• Twitalyzer: A new tool from the folks at Web Analytics Demystified, Twitalyzer goes beyond basic metrics to show the influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity and a whole host of other metrics related to your Twitter account. Take one trip through Twitalyzer, and you’ll have a clear idea of where you need to focus to make your Twitter use more effective.

• Google Analytics: To measure the number of people visiting your website from the Twitter.com domain, try Google Analytics.

• Omniture: This enterprise Web analytics package recently added Twitter integration, enabling clients to view brand comments over time, influencers vs. detractors, and a host of other metrics.

Monitoring & Alert Services

• Search.Twitter.com: Though there are several options for monitoring what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, this one might be the easiest. And it’s free. Use this service to set up RSS feeds related to the words you care about. (Please note: It does have limitations, such as how far back in time you can go.)

• TweetBeep.com: This service is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Enter your keywords
(e.g. company name, product, competitors, etc.) and receive regular updates whenever someone mentions those words in social media.

• Monitter: This new service provides a live streaming view of what people in your location are saying about your company or employees.

• Radian6 and Techrigy: These two enterprise-class monitoring tools help a company listen to conversations happening throughout the social media universe, not just Twitter. The tools are loaded with additional powerful functionality for managing your brand.

Marketing Tools

• TwtQpon: Use TwtQpon to create exclusive deals for your products or services, and share them with your followers.

• TwitterHawk: A novel marketing application, TwitterHawk connects you with people actively talking about your product or service within your area. For example, if you own a sandwich shop and someone in town tweets about getting a sandwich, you can automatically send them a customized response. The service costs five cent per tweet.

• TwitBacks.com and TwitterGallery.com: Want more than the design options that Twitter provides? Use either of these services to improve the look and feel of your Twitter page. TwitBacks.com allows you to provide additional business contact information, and a photo or logo as well.

So there you have it, so have at it. And don't forget to thank marketingprofs by signing up and getting access to all the great stuff available on their site. And by the way, I'm just a big fan - they're not endorsing my admiration.

Tweet us @atomicideas

Happy holidays!

Black n' Blue Friday

Seems just about every retailer  has a "Black Friday" sale.  "Black Friday" sales are definately the "hot" marketing tactic. 

In fact, I even saw a TV commercial for Maaco for their "Black Friday" sale. Seems you can save big on every paint service they offer until Saturday at noon. The problem is, I saw the commercial at 11:12 pm Saturday night. 

Not only have they wasted their money by not utilizing this "hot" tactic correctly, but now I actually have a lower opinion of them. If they can't get their advertising right, what else will they mess up? My paint job?

It's the same with marketers and the "hot" tactic of social marketing. Done incorrectly, companies at best lose their window of opportunity for influencing consumers at the proper point in the buying cycle, and at worst, they risk converting a neutral attitude to their product or service, into a negative one. 

I got nothing

 What do bloggers do when they get writer's block? They surf the web, they check out you-tube. Anything to get an idea to spout about. I like the good old days when something important happened or there was a burning issue that needed to be ranted about first -- then it got an article written about it. But many bloggers, myself included, feel compelled to write a blog on a regular basis -- important issue or not.  Something to do with rankings in the blogosphere, people counting on it, etc.

I, for instance, have just completed a big assignment, there is no big issue weighing on my mind, and I have just had a big meal and am feeling quite content. The last thing I want to do is rant. So here I am blogging just to keep a tenuous rank in the blogoshphere. Does anyone else feel the same way? (Because of course, getting people to comment on a blog or answer a question is another way to boost the rating).

Well, that's all I have to say on the subject. Which isn't much. But you pretty much knew that from the title.

Don't Keep on Truckin'

I was talking with a guy who runs a digital marketing agency. We were discussing his proposal to a client to handle a social media campaign for them, to do content marketing.

He committed to writing and sending out 20 articles a month for them, 5 articles a week. I asked him if they had that much good stuff to send out every week. He said, "It doesn't matter. We'll get their name out there even if we have to write about a truck the company buys. They want 20 articles sent out every month, then we'll make things up to write about."

I said to him that was just pushing static out onto an already crowded Internet, and after awhile people aren't going to read the dribble that comes from that company. "The search engines will pick the articles up, their rankings will go up", he said.

Writing for the search engines, not for customers. Who's your audience? Search spiders or living, breathing customers?

Content marketing is definitely a great way to be found through organic search. But people appreciate and are looking for relevant, valuable information.

Back to that mission of '20 articles per month'. I recently suggested to a client (who wanted us to send out 20 articles/month - had they been talking to that other guy??) to reframe it as '20 posts per month'. Posts can be:

• relevant articles (written to help inform customers, not spiders)
• a post on a blog
• an informative video
• a response to a question
• a podcast

Add all the posts up over the course of a month. 20 is then doable. It may be 4-5 really good articles and the rest other content. And then you're out there socializing it up in a variety of ways and in engaging conversations. Include 'next action' steps in your communication and you'll be bringing customer back for more.

The side benefit as you send out quality, next step content is that you'll be creating a reputation as a trusted resource of information, building your brand reputation. 

Not just blathering on about a truck.