We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just launched the beta version of our new site.

You can view it at beta.usefulsocialmedia.com.

While there are still some teething problems, we wanted to show you what we’ve done as quickly as we could.

A quick tour of the new USM.com

New navigation system to deep-dive into the areas that matter to you

We’ve spent a lot of time working on the site navigation. There are a couple of things to highlight here:

A new navigation bar splits our content into themes.

• Marketing: Insight on marketing best practice, news and developments
• Customer Insight: Looking at both customer service and response, along with how to use social media to get a fuller picture of your customer
• Reputation: How companies are using social media for brand management, reputation preservation and crisis communications
• Measurement: Tracking impact and ROI of various aspects of social media strategy
• Embed Social: Looking at how companies are moving towards becoming a ‘social business’ by embedding social media across multiple departments and corporate functions

Get to the most useful analysis first

We highlight our ‘featured’ articles in our new ‘Headline Carousel’, so you’ll never miss the best and most insightful articles.

See the latest articles as soon as they’re available

Equally, we hope you’ll be checking in on the site daily, so we’ve also highlighted our latest articles on the right.

That way, you can see exactly what has changed since your last visit, and get all the newest news and analysis as soon as it’s ready.

Get the news that’s causing a buzz

Once you dive into a specific are of social media, you’ll see a new box on the right hand side, highlighting the most popular articles within that area.

At the moment, this is just based on views that month, but we’ll be integrating social media mentions and buzz shortly.

Deep-dive into topics that matter to you

Not only can you now view our articles by area, but we have started to highlight related articles we published previously.

This way, you can do further reading around whatever issue you’re looking into, and ensure you get all the insight we have available on the topics that matter to you and your job.

And find targetted content on specific issues

The whole site is now searchable, so you can find insight on any topic we’ve ever investigated on the site. Just use our new scrolling search and navigation bar.

A big push to discuss

We’ve had Disqus commenting available on our articles for a while now, and they’re back on the new site.

This way, you can keep your Disqus profile from social interactions around the web, and use it when getting involved in the USM conversation.

Highlighting the most current opinions

We know that social media is all about conversation, so we’ve gone further with the new redesign.

Wherever you are on our site, you’ll be able to see the conversation that’s happening with our new ‘recent comments’ box.

Here, not only will the most up-to-date insight and commentary from our community get shared, but you’ll be able to jump right to the article where the best discussion is taking place.

Make your own voice heard 

You don’t need to stick to the USM site, either.

With our new sharing functionality from ShareThis, you can post articles and comments to whatever social profile you like.

As soon as you see an article you think might be of interest to your community…you know the drill.

If you want to engage with us over social media, you’ll see all our social profiles collected at the top of the page in our new scrolling navigation.

Get a more tailored, relevant and useful experience from USM

We’re trying to practice what we preach, and get more information from our community to ensure you only get the most relevant data, analysis and information from us.

Our weekly e-brief is one of our most popular products. It shares not only the best analysis from UsefulSocialMedia.com, but the best and most insightful commentary from around the web.

But we know it can improve, and we want to make it more relevant to you. Right now, we’re asking you to let us know what areas of social media you care about by using our new newsletter signup form. Once we’ve got enough insight from the community, we’ll only send you news about the topics you’ve said you want to hear about.

Of course, if your priorities change, you just need to fill in the newsletter signup box again, and we’ll add your new focus areas.

Never miss a chance to learn even more from your peers

Our conferences and reports have great feedback from our community, and we want to ensure you can find out about every event and intelligence report that will benefit you.

All our upcoming conferences are highlighted on the right hand side of the page, and once you jump into a specific area of corporate social media, we’ll show you the conferences and reports relating to that area on the right.

If you want to sign up to be kept updated on specific events or reports we have upcoming, then you can also do that from our new scrolling navigation bar.

A new tool for you to leverage the full power of social media for your business

Social media has completely changed how companies do business. Or aim at Useful Social Media is to help you navigate a rapidly changing environment, and make the best business decisions – based on insight and experience from your peers – the practitioners working on these issues at some of the biggest and most forward-looking companies in the world.

Our new site is another way we’re trying to do that.

We hope you like it.

We’d love your feedback. You can use the comments on this article to share your views, grab us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, or email our founder directly on nick.johnson@usefulsocialmedia.com.

The advantages of a strong content strategy are numerous: You can form a direct relationship with your consumers, build trust, engage with your target market and leverage these growing relationships to further the brand and customer advocacy. However, it’s more than just a few tweets or a Facebook update. Great content needs to be:

• Relevant

• Adaptable

• Re-usable

• Valuable

• Focused

According to Social Media Around the World 2012, by InSites Consulting, the average number of brands that each person follows and interacts with is five.

You need to make sure that your business is one of the five that your target consumer chooses to interact with in a sea of brands all desperate to achieve the same goal. And brands like Coca Cola and Google  have already taken two spots. That leaves you three. What are you doing to get your market’s attention?

“For many businesses, particularly those offering a customer-facing service, the implementation of a social media strategy is integral to success,” says Roland van Breukelen, solution advisor, SAP Cloud EMEA, “It’s not just about having one department sat at the end of a computer or mobile device pushing out content.”

Content creation

Social communication comes with its own set of risks and issues that are avoided at your peril. Poor content management, a failure to understand your market, a lack of a coherent strategy – these factors will likely do as much damage as a stagnant policy that refuses to move with the times.

“We use a phrase all the time, and it’s a bit of a cliché, but the key to successful content is serving the right content, at the right time, to the right person,” says Jeremy Waite, head of social consulting at Adobe, “Identify the content your business should produce for its social media channels the same way you would find out what to sell to your customers. Either you ask them, or you learn to understand them well enough to know what they want.”

So relevance is key. And relevance needs to be married to quality. Danny Cox, head of advice, Hargreaves Lansdown, says, “Quality content works over quantity every time. In all our online and print presence we aim to produce high quality content to draw readers in and give them reasons to keep coming back.”

Adobe’s Jeremy Waite, however, believes that: “Relevance is more important than either quality or quantity. Given the two, you’d have to vote for quality, however, audiences on social media respond best to regular content.”

Paddy Power recently won the title of Most Social Brand of 2012 at the Drum’s social media Buzz awards because they understand their audience so well that the content they create is highly engaging and drives sales.

“Love them or hate them, it’s not hard to see why Paddy Power are one of the best content brands in the UK at the moment,” adds Jeremy Waite, “Paddy Power post on Facebook up to seven times per day, and they have huge engagement rates. This all comes back to understanding your audience, what they want to receive from you, and how often they want to receive it.”

Developing strategies

Ask questions. What are your objectives? Who are you trying to connect with? What do your competitors do? What are your internal assets and do you already have existing communities? Kayleigh Stoneage, community manager at The Social Partners, says, “Social media should be about dialogue and how your business takes part. Ideally content should inspire people to talk about it and the business should be prepared to be in that conversation.”

Hargreaves Lansdown’s Danny Cox adds, “Content needs to be interesting and relevant and written for the reader, not the writer. The language must be straightforward with no jargon. If content is engaging, then the audience will read to the end, regardless of length.”

Plan it carefully and maximise its efficiency, give your content a shelf life and allow others to engage with your business. Afford readers the opportunity to comment, to share and create content that elicits an emotional response.

Compelling content is hard to make. “Just over five percent of tweets are original content,” says Jeremy Waite, “There is very little interesting, original content. There is often a misunderstanding among senior executives that social media is cheap and easy. It’s not. It’s incredibly hard and can be very expensive.”

You may have a phenomenal understanding of how your market works, the language you need to communicate with your customers, the goals you want to achieve and a superb team ready to take the content to social media channels, but what is your content strategy?

“I am constantly astounded at senior marketers who still don’t understand what strategy is,” continued Jeremy Waite. “Recently I had people come to me and say things like ‘Our strategy is to reach one million fans’ or ‘ we will become the biggest fashion brand in the UK by having the best content on highly engaged social media channels’. Those are not strategies. Those are goals, or targets.”

“It’s quite alarming to see brands using social media channels without any kind of strategy,” adds The Social Partners’ Kayleigh Stoneage. “A lot of brands turn to social media just because everyone else is there, and you can tell from the types of content they upload.”

First steps

Waite advises you to take your strategy and break it into three parts:

1. Diagnosis
2. Definition
3. Action

Diagnose the problem and ask yourself why you are entering the social media sphere. Define how you are going to solve this problem and what your basic approach is going to be. Act by planning what you are going to do about this in order to reach your goals and objectives.

Content must be relevant, users must want to share it, re-use it, learn from it, engage with it. Content must be part of a defined strategy so that it communicates the message clearly and always, always drives the brand. Don’t be daunted by the learning curve, remember, all content strategies start with a simple question – what should we share on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn?

Avoid tackling a social media strategy at your peril. A stagnant content pool with no active strategy or audience focus will not drive your business forward. Interestingly a recent report ‘Social in the City’ highlighted which organisations on the FTSE 100 were actively using social media and which were not, and how their social media activity affected share prices.

The higher the social media performance scores, the more positive the changes in share prices. Now that should inspire you to create great, relevant content within a well defined content strategy.

Coming in Part 2

In the next part of this thee-part feature we will be looking at how to develop a content strategy for all of the content that a business will release onto its social channels. How to use brand advocates to create and disseminate content for your brand, and how to segment an audience to tailor fit content. Plus how to measure the effectiveness of one kind of content when compared to another for social channels.

What you can learn from Skittles’ use of social media to build their brand voice

Skittles have long innovated in social media – a couple of years ago they gave over their entire webpage to their Twitter feed.

This year, they’ve moved on from simply highlighting their Twitter feed to putting some real work into the messaging and persona they share on the network.

According to The Wall blog, their feed is “quite literally like its product and comes across as if it has ‘tasted the Rainbow”. Essentially, it is rather offbeat, strange – and pretty amusing.

It shows a certain level of confidence in both social media use, and in the strength of the Skittles brand. And the tweets get a level of engagement that most brands could only dream of. If you’re looking to convince your CMO of the value of a more ‘human’ social media presence, then show them Skittles.

The death of the social media director – again?

A couple of weeks ago, we shared the news that the ‘social media director’ role was about to die out. This week, the news is no brighter, as Alan Kittle posits that ‘the end of digital marketing is nigh’ over at The Wall blog.

Kittle starts his piece linking to a Forrester report that predicts ‘digital marketing’ will simply merge into ‘marketing’ in 2013, and then weighs in on the ensuing debate on whether ‘digital’ should still be a separate silo to the rest of marketing.

His view is that considering ‘audiences don’t act in a neat, vertical way’, a brand simply can’t afford to run anything other than a truly integrated marketing campaign, which speaks to the customer in a consistent way, wherever they happen to discover the brand message.

It’s a fundamentally sound viewpoint, and one we wholeheartedly agree with over at Useful Social Media.

Bacardi on how social media must start proving ROI

Over at The Drum, Bacardi’s Head of Digital, Peter Clare, is sharing his views on corporate social media in 2013. He makes a few key points:

1. 2013 will be the year of mobile – According to Clare, brands will be predominantly focusing on incorporating mobile into overarching marketing strategy this year
2. The growth of digital and social is having an impact all the way up the food chain – Clare expects CEOs and CMOs to be forced to ‘get their hands dirty’ aligning their entire company with the new digital landscape
3. Integrated marketing is about to get a lot harder - Interestingly, Clare suggests that as Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and the like intensify their efforts to take market share from each other, your job in putting together an integrated campaign across all sites is about to get a whole lot harder.

You can see the full article at The Drum.

A second look at Facebook’s Graph Search

So, the news has been out for a week – Facebook have launched their new search product, ‘Graph Search’ (We pulled together some of the best articles and analysis last week).

This week, a couple of sideways looks at the service. First, Mashable highlight a video from Nick Douglas showing how use of the service can pretty quickly descend into something pretty creepy. Second, Dan Lyons pre-emptively groups Graph Search into a list of Facebook’s biggest flops in a sceptical look at the future of the new technology.

Two exciting pieces of Useful Social Media news

The more observant amongst you will have noticed our website looks a bit different this week. We’ve had a redesign. The aim is to put useful content in front of you – making it easy to find, easy to read (and easy to share). Over the last year or so we’ve published over 250 original articles of social media analysis, insight and interviews. The new site is designed to help you find it, and use it. Any feedback on the (currently beta, and very much unfinished) site, please let us know.

We’re running a new (free) webinar: In the run up to our Corporate Social Media Summit in New York, we’re putting together a webinar featuring three of our key speakers sharing practical insight on one of the biggest topics we’ll be covering. If you want to learn more about embedding social across your company with the CMO of Sears, VP of Social at Wells Fargo and Senior Director of Digital from Thomson Reuters, then register for the webinar here.

Name: Nick Cifuentes, Director, Global Social Media

Bio: Nick Cifuentes is the global social media director at Ancestry.com. An industry veteran, Nick has worked in digital media and marketing since 2004, functioning in strategy, copywriting, analytics, search, planning, online media and social media.

How does Ancestry.com use the social media channels it maintains?

I have been with the company for about two years. Before I came onboard the site really didn’t have a well-defined social media strategy – it didn’t really have its own vertical, as it was sort of grouped with PR. The site had a Facebook page, but the company wasn’t really doing anything with it. There wasn’t any steady level of engagement.

What I would say is that when it comes to social media the site doesn’t have the kind of content that usually attracts the usual social media crowd. Our demographic is aged 45 plus, which are our core customers. However, what we do have – which differentiates us in the market place – is the level of content on our site.

The site now has a global presence within the social media channels. Today we have 45 plus channels of engagement that we use. We did this very quickly with each of our global presences ramping up their use of social media within about six months after I started with the company.

Of course we tend to focus in the US as this is our largest property, but we have seen all of our engagement channels moving to a very high level, which we continue to develop.

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on?

When you look at social each business is different. At Ancestry we do try and attach a value to all the social channels we are involved with. For us we tie the activity we have on the social networks to two types of conversion:

The first is a person that comes to the site and they sign up for our services. If a person does this they will have given us their credit card. We see a sign up as a core business goal, which the social channel helps us achieve. The second is when a person registers with the site but does not give us their credit card number. They are of course not as valuable, but they are a potential lead and they are followed up in due course.

So we use the social systems to understand the value of what we are doing. We look at a lot of click stream data, sentiment perception, qualitative and quantitative analysis of data, as these metrics allow us to see which elements of our activity are successful, but also how this flows back to our bottom line. We work with Google Analytics to track all of the material that we push out into the social space to see what comes back and how this impacts on our business.

We now have the ability to take our budget spend and compare this to sign ups on the site to generate a figure that gives us an indication of the value linked to that sign up, but more importantly, we know where that sign up came from and what prompted them to come to the site. This could be any of the materials we push out across the social space, but because we track this material, we have a very good idea of its value.

What kind of engagement is your company seeing?

I would say that over the last six months we have been focusing on brand advocacy. We clearly understand that the fans of our site are our strongest advocates. For businesses these are the people that will help you develop your offering.

We have used two advocate programs over the past year. We have two US-focused initiatives, and a third that will launch in the UK in the first quarter of 2013. One of the first was what we called Ancestry ACES, which is a blog that uses content that is totally independent of our site.

We initially reached out to our user base to identify which of our users was more socially enabled. We got close to a million responses from our first request, and from those, we identified about 150,000 people whom we launched the program with. These people are prolific sharers, and prolific content creators. These are the personality traits of an advocate that we really want to build upon.

Since the program started running lat April 2012, we send out a bi-weekly emails that gives these people advanced information about what is happening on Ancestry. It’s like a VIP program that gives these advocates materials they can disseminate to their followers. We give them a lot of promotions they can give away on their blogs, we also gave them a badge and a widget they can embed in their blog to give us a high number of back links to our site. We’re also trying out more specific stuff for these users including Google+ like hangouts and VIP video material that is just for these users.

The second major program we are running is with a third party Zuberance that helps us build brand advocacy. This platform allows Ancestry to broadcast marketing content and seed people into sharing that content. What we are trying to do is create content that users will want to instantly share with their followers, other users, friends or family. We really do see advocacy as a key part of growing our brand’s presence on the social channels. And of course we are lucky in that we have a lot of content to share in these spaces.

In addition to these programs we also have an entire customer support module where we have people live on the channels daily answering questions and enquires that come in. We have an entire staff that is dedicated to providing this service to our customers.

As businesses have begun to realize that social media touches every aspect of their organizations, how does Ancestry place social within its business hierarchy?

Before I came to Ancestry my background was mostly with agencies, which means I understood how social was becoming more than a simple marketing exercise. Here at Ancestry social was situated within PR, but we have now moved it into its own realm. What this means in practice is that if you look at our organizational structure you will see that social has its own channel, but it is overseen by out chief marketing officer.

Under me I have six managers that focus globally, and the support group that I mentioned before. And of course when I came on, I requested a number of things that have an impact on the company’s budget, so resources that are allocated are part of the wider budgeting and planning that the business does.

Also, what was gratifying was that when we looked at the company’s goals for the next year, there were clearly defined goals for social and not just our general marketing developments. So for Ancestry, social is a key contributing factor to growing the business. Of course social is not as direct as an acquisition for instance, but social does have a long-term impact that our business understands is important to develop.

And I also have a tools budget that will be for the analytical systems I use, which of course cost money. With my background I knew which tools I wanted to bring to Ancestry and how these could be used to deliver the goals the company wanted to meet in the social space. The advice I would give is that a business needs to look at the whole environment of their enterprise and factor in social to those areas where this channel can help them grow.

In one section of our forthcoming State of Corporate Social Media briefing, we look at the current adoption rates of social networks by businesses. The findings were generated from our State of Corporate Social Media survey – where we asked corporate practitioners about various elements of their business’ social media function.

A look at differing b2b and b2c adoption rates

One of the first obvious conclusions is the wide discrepancy in adoption rates between b2c and b2b companies. LinkedIn is the most used network by b2b companies – with 88% of respondents using the network. This is hardly a revelatory finding, considering the exclusive focus on attracting business users. The ability to identify and message individuals and groups from a variety of business communities has evidently appealed to b2b social media practitioners. Following close on the heels of LinkedIn’s popularity is Twitter, with an 87% adoption rate.

In third place, with 81% of the vote, is Facebook. With over one billion members, Facebook’s sheer scale makes it a hard network to ignore, though the under-developed nature of the platform’s employment profiling, and the overwhelming focus on personal relationships makes the platform drop down the ratings when we ask respondents to choose the most useful network for them. Only 17% chose Facebook. LinkedIn came top, though the relatively small 37% of respondents shows that B2B social media has diversified to an extent.

The same cannot be said for b2c companies. Facebook’s focus on personal relationships has made it an even more useful network for those companies looking to sell to individual consumers rather than companies. An enormous 65% of b2c companies rank the network as the most useful, while adoption rates are at 97%. Twitter is second on both adoption (83%) and usefulness (17%).

The death of corporate blogging

Two social channels worthy of a mention are YouTube and corporate blogging. For many, blogging was the first foray into the world of social media. Evidently, that time has passed. Only 48% of b2c companies now use a corporate blog, and only 55% of their b2b counterparts. These low figures are unsurprising – only 3% of consumer-focused companies rank blogging as their most useful social channel. The figure is slightly higher (at 12%) for b2b companies – but both statistics seem to imply that the newer networks have added functionality and technology that is seen as more useful by corporate practitioners.

A surprising showing for YouTube

YouTube is worth of mention for a surprisingly strong showing. Producing YouTube content is inherently more difficult – the complexity of shooting video, the cost, and the time involved are all higher than for text and image based networks like Twitter and Facebook. And yet 71% of b2c companies, and an even more surprising 70% of b2bs have a presence on the network. B2Bs also rank YouTube more highly in terms of utility – 11% choosing it as their most useful network versus only 6% for their b2c peers.

In the next piece in the series, we will look at corporate adoption of newer, and more global networks – taking in 2012’s darlings Pinterest and Instagram, and also taking a look at Russia’s VKontakte and China’s Sina Weibo.

To stay up to date with all Useful Social Media’s analysis, sign up for our newsletter at the top of the page. It’s delivered every Wednesday. For a full, free copy of the State of Corporate Social Media briefing on publication, email nick.johnson@usefulsocialmedia.com.

Facebook yesterday released initial details about their Next Big Thing (and perhaps social media’s next big thing), Graph Search. A new search function through the site that allows users to make better use of the vast amount of data they have access to in their ‘social graph’ (ie “my friends in New York who like Jay Z”).

Steven Levy from Wired has written the best article on the new product – calling it calls it a “transformative product”, and one that will almost certainly ensure people use Facebook in entirely new ways – something a corporate audience is going to care about. Intriguingly, in the piece Levy quotes Tom Stocky, one of the leaders of the Graph Search project, as saying “. “It’s like Facebook is this big database and you’re doing a lookup on the results that match”. If that doesn’t get corporate marketers salivating (social CRM, audience insights, new audience identification and demographics), we don’t know what will.

Panera’s ‘hidden menu’ gives a successful case study on how brands can integrate social media with location in a whole new way

Last week, Panera Bread sent out a tweet announcing a new ‘hidden menu’ – essentially allowing people over social media to order a new ‘slow carb’ set of products that aren’t advertised in store. As well as generating a huge amount of buzz over social networks (and save Point of Sale space in store), the hidden menu has really helped to engage followers on social media – people felt special, and like their engagement with the company has given them advantages over other consumers. It’s a good idea – Starbucks and In-And-Out Burger have both done similar – and the article from EB Solomont is certainly worth a read.

Media Convergence and Samsung

Always a company pretty close to the bleeding edge of marketing – particularly digital marketing – best practice, Samsung last week showed us one way to start integrating social with other marketing channels with a campaign with the Associated Press during the Consumer Electronics Show.

According to Rebecca Lieb in this article, it’s a “stunning example of how quickly media convergence is moving, and how rapidly roles and workflow are changing”.While focusing on the impacts on PR agencies, the article raises some intriguing possibilities for brands. Could the future be someone like Target (or Tesco, in the UK) charging a company like Unilever for a presence on their own social feed? Are we going to see brands with considerable social influence become advertising sellers? Check out the article for more, and if you want to know more about the convergence of paid, owned and earned media, then check out this great article from David Armano.

Two new reports which should be of interest to Corporate Social Media practitioners were released this week:

Socialising your CEO

Weber Shandwick’s new study announced, and shows that 64% of CEOs from the world’s largest companies don’t use social. CEOs are critical to brand reputation and perception (apparently 49% of corporate reputation is attributable to the CEO), and according to the study, companies with social CEOs have a ‘higher reputational status’.

Digital Marketing Priorities for 2013

EConsultancy’s quarterly digital intelligence briefing reveals what digital marketers anticipate will be their priorities in 2013. There are two priorities for 2013, content marketing and conversion rate optimisation. Read some analysis from Business2Community on the survey and trends here.

If you’re in the mood for more statistics, facts, trends and analysis, then our very own State of Corporate Social Media briefing is about to be released. Based on responses from over 850 social media practitioners, the briefing will give you detail on priorities for 2013, shifting workflows and organisation of social media within companies, budgets, measurement tactics and more. We’ll let you know when it’s ready, but you can see some preliminary stats over at Nick’s blog here.

That’s all for this week, see you next time.

Unsurprisingly, the web is littered with opinion pieces on how corporate social media is going to evolve in 2013. Ryan Holmes from Hootsuite thinks that social media is going to get increasingly embedded across more corporate departments (we do, too); Matthew Knell from AOL says that your social media team will add a dedicated content strategist (and we agree with that, as well); Rob Howard, CTO of Telligent says that business is going to move away from Facebook pages towards branded communities (we’re not sure about that one).

We also put together our views on the key trends for 2013, and wrote a short series of pieces on each trend (customer-centricity; accessible consumer; death of push marketing) back in September. Read more here.

Social media highlights from 2012

If you want a quick review of the big social media stories in 2012, The SEO Company have you covered with a nice infographic.Featuring Kony 2012, Anonymous being named Time’s ‘Most Influential Person’; June’s revelation that 33% of people are now tweeting while watching TV (hello, transmedia); Obama’s “This seat’s taken” response to Clint Eastwood; and Facebook’s inevitable billionth member. It was quite a year.

Laura Stampler at Business Insider has also put together a list of 7 corporate social media highlights from 2012. Old Spice and Taco Bell had a very humanizing argument; as did Oreo and AMC Cinemas. Bodyform responded to a rant on their Facebook page with a great video (which has now been seen over 3.5m times). Wal*Mart went along with a hijacking of their competition to have Pitbull play in one of their stores (inevitable competition winner – Kodiak, Alaska) and got lots of good publicity.

The one big important massive trend for 2013: Fire your Social Media Director

Well, according to Alex Williams over at TechCrunch. His argument runs that

1. Social Media Directors rarely know what they’re doing
2. The existence of Social Media Directors engenders a centralised, corporate, limiting structure around social – and that’s a bad thing

Williams links to a great article at SocialFresh pointing out that as social gets more important for business, one can’t afford to silo it any more. It’s got to cross departments (does that view sound familiar?).
The piece finishes with a list of 10 ‘wishes’ for the enterprise who is still stuck with a silo’ed, limited social media strategy. It’s worth a read (here).

But the big one is number one – “Start talking to each other.”

It’s critical that different departments start to work together more closely if social is going to be of most benefit for your company. It’s necessary because your customer expects to talk to your business like it’s another person, not a several thousand-strong conglomerate. And for that to work, you’ve all got to be singing from the same hymn-sheet.

And, once everyone works together, the benefits start to accrue quickly. True customer-centricity becomes possible. You know way more about your customer, and you can tailor your business to fit them. Your marketing will get more response, your customer service department will be quieter – you’ll sell more stuff to a happier customer.

So – Marketing, Comms, HR, IR, Customer Service, Product Development: If you’re not already talking with your peers in those departments, you had better start quickly.

We wouldn’t go so far as to advise firing the Social Media Director. But we would ensure that #1 Priority for that person is getting that internal conversation happening.

Hope everyone is well?

Plenty of activity across the social web this week…

How not to do social media

Looking back over the past 12 months clearly shows that some companies have yet to understand the rules of engagement when it comes to social media. Social Media Influence has put together a list of the social media bloopers committed this year. Highlights include Gap and American Apparel using Hurricane Sandy as a marketing tool.

United Airlines completely ignoring a customer complaint that resulted in a viral video that left the brand licking its wounds. And the Co-operative had an astonishing lack of oversight by allowing a photo of a nearly naked man to be posted to its Twitter account. Lets hope these lessons have been learned as we move through 2013.

Emerging social media markets

As social media continues its inexorable rise to dominance, businesses are looking to identify which territories will be touched next by the social media bug. A new infographic from BestFreeOnline gives a clear indication that it’s going to be the BRIC economies that will be jumping onto the social bandwagon next.

And what is clear is that the localised social media networks are where the growth will come from. In these markets Facebook and Google do not dominate. There is certainly traffic across these networks – Brazil for instance is highly active on Facebook, but companies looking at the BRIC economies as potential markets for their goods and services need to understand how these global platforms interface with local systems. For instance in China OZone has over 700 million active users.

Do you factor in social media when decision-making?

Research from the Zeno Group in their Digital Readiness survey clearly shows that CEOs have yet to embrace social media in their overall decision-making processes. The key findings encapsulated in their infographic include: B2B companies lag their B2C counterparts – their CEOs are less likely to consider social media in decision-making, they are slower to engage in a crisis, and they are twice as likely to refuse to engage online audiences at all.

The bigger the company the more likely that the CEO will consider social media in their decision-making.

In fact, 43% of smaller firms said their executives rarely or never consider social media reputation. Smaller does not necessarily mean more nimble in social media. A fast response to an online crisis is more likely in larger companies.

In Brief…

Social media comes of age?

The latest in-depth report from Nielsen has now been out for a few weeks and has given everyone a chance to digest its findings. The key finding is clearly that consumers are continuing to expand their consumption of social media, and are now spending even more time on these networks.

Nielsen concluded that: “Consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20% of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30% of total time online via mobile.  Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37% to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.”

Visual sharing

As the end of the year draws closer, taking a look back at 2012 reveals the most engaging social media campaigns of the last year. Simply Zesty have focused on the most shared social video ads of the year. The list compiled by Unruly Media includes the highly successful Nike ‘My Time is Now’ ad, the Red Bull: Athlete Machine campaign, the Go Pro: Black Edition, Smaller, Lighter and 2X More Powerful, and the Air New Zealand and WETA: An Unexpected Briefing.

Social media giving

A new infographic from MDG Advertising make for interesting reading if you re involved with non-profit businesses that want to have a deeper understanding of how social media impacts on your business sector. The infographic shows that Facebook is favoured by 98% of nonprofits, followed by Twitter trusted by 74%, YouTube utilized by 66%, and LinkedIn used by nearly half of charities. Interestingly, individual donations are the most requested and received by these foundations on Facebook.

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.

A few things to cover this week:

The top 10 social media fails of 2012

While Susan Boyle may have something to say about her lack of presence, UK-based eConsultancy have otherwise done a good job of rounding up some of the more questionable social media campaigns of 2012. Featuring the famous #McDStories and #Waitrosereasons hashtags, alongside some frankly amazing(ly stupid) engagement from Kitchen Aid and Urban Outfitters, this list should provide you with plenty of reasons to tighten up that social media policy ready for 2013.

Any that eConsultancy missed, please let us know in the comments!

Mashable’s “Social Media Marketing Checklist for 2013″ released – not revelatory

While those of you with a relatively mature social marketing team/approach won’t see anything completely revolutionary, Mashable’s 2013 Marketing Checklist is still worth a read.

It lists the 5 things you should be doing before the end of the year to ensure your social marketing strategy is adequately prepped for the start of next year. There’s additional detail here, but the advice is:

1. Get internal teams on board
2. Collect all internal assets
3. Review your 2012 Social Activity
4. Review your SEO program
5. Define your social goals for 2013

Two thirds of FTSE 100 companies failing at social media

Sociagility have released a report harking back to the glory days of Carrie, Samantha et al – “Social Media in the City.”

Some of the highlights:

1. 72% of the FTSE 100 have created some kind of corporate Twitter account
2. 65% have a corporate YouTube channel
3. Only 56% have a Facebook page
4. Only 20% have an active LinkedIn presence

The future of the CMO: Chief Experience Officer?

Another strong piece from eConsultancy – this time looking into the future for the Chief Marketing Officer. Social has heralded a huge shift in how marketing is handled internally, and customer experience has increasingly become a key differentiator against your competitors.

This analysis piece gives an enormously thought-provoking impression as to how these shifts will impact on the CMO – and the marketing function more broadly.

Your help needed: The return of the biggest corporate social media survey in the world

Since 2010, we’ve been asking our community for your insights on the advancement of social media in your business. In 2011, we had over 650 respondents from all over the world complete our survey. Over the last couple of years, over 17,000 people have downloaded the briefing we write based on the results.

Well the survey is back. And we need your help. You can give us your answers on the state of social media use and adoption in your business here.

Thank you. We share all the findings (anonymously) in the briefing, which we’ll publish in Q1. It’s free. The more people fill in the survey, the better the briefing will be!

That’s all for this week – we’ll be back next Wednesday.

Hope everyone is well?

Plenty of activity across the social web this week…

Social media marketing mistakes

Social media is rapidly developing, but it seems that we still don’t fully understand the rules of engagement. Simply Zesty have pulled together some of the biggest marketing mistakes brands continue to commit, with their blog post making sobering reading if your company has yet to fully embrace what social media can offer your business.

Brands can clearly benefit from embracing social media, but this has to be done with integrated messages that engage with the brand advocates. In addition, listening to customers is also a fundamental aspect of effectively utilising social media. For instance, Smart Car in the US turned a joke at their expense into an infographic that engaged with its followers.

What’s Your Company’s Facebook LPM (Likes per Million)?

Every company can compare its brand value to that of its competitors based on a readily available scale: Facebook “likes,” adjusted for company revenue. Booze & Co has developed a new metric using their own brand strategy indicator.

The Facebook LPM index offers companies at least two courses of action that they haven’t had before. If you use Facebook to create an engaging environment, where you monitor the market and shape the dialogue, your growth in likes per million can tell you how well you’re succeeding with the increasingly influential online audience — and whether your overall brand engagement, even if it seems strong, could be at risk.

 In data we trust?

A new book has been highlighted by the NMK blog. In Data We Trust by Björn Bloching, Lars Luck and Thomas Ramge argues that access to – and interpretation of – consumer data will be the key differentiator between success and failure in the future of marketing. The authors argue that data will become the new marketing.

The authors state: “Over the course of this decade, the long-term winners in data-based marketing can only be the companies that create a clearly recognisable added value in a transparent way. The differentiation helps them to provide better products and services, and customer can use common sense to understand or guess what information has led to their being offered which product.”

Web savvy consumers are increasingly discerning about the information they give away. Only those companies that are agile enough to collect this data will win the marketing war that is now being fought across the social networks.

In Brief…

Content marketing growth continues

The latest report: ‘The Spending Study: A Look at How Corporate America Invests in Branded Content for 2012’ from Custom Content Council and ContentWise clearly reveals that brand content is getting a bigger slice of the marketing pie—a 13% increase, or $1,640,107 in spending for the last two years. A thriving sign for the content marketing industry, 79% of marketers are now reporting that their companies are shifting into branded content either at a moderate or aggressive pace. Fifty-two percent of companies are reporting that they outsourced some portion of at least one type of branded content creation in 2012.

“The stability of brand content spend in the face of overall marketing budget decline proves the staying power and efficacy of content marketing,” said Lori Rosen, Executive Director, Custom Content Council.  “This notable growth outcome is motivating brands to outsource at record levels.”

Social media ad revenue increases to $9.2 billion by 2016

New figures from BIA/Kelsey forecasts U.S. social media ad revenues to reach $9.2 billion in 2016, up from $4.6 billion in 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%.

BIA/Kelsey expects robust growth during the forecast period from native social ad formats, which are emerging as viable display alternatives. The firm defines native social advertising as branded content integrated within a social network experience (e.g., the newsfeed or content stream).

Must see marketing charts

A set of new marketing infographics from Eloqua and JESS3 make for essential reading. As Eloqua state: “The rise of Big Data provides marketers with an unprecedented level of insight. But too often, it’s easy to get buried by the data. We put together 40 Must-See Charts for Modern Marketers, offering analysis and intelligence today’s marketers need to know across a range of disciplines – from email marketing and lead management to social media and events.”

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.