Category Archives: Marketing

10 Facebook for Business Best Practices: thanks to Hubspot

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I borrowed these top ten from inbound marketing experts Hubspot. Do you have any Facebook business tips you’d like to add?

1. Be interactive, fun and helpful. When people reach your Facebook page, they are looking for some kind of interaction. Don‟t disappoint them. As an example, a hardware company offered their Facebook fans links, applications, and engaging information, and within a short time, they added 26,000 fans! <And the more interaction, the higher you score on the ‘EdgeRank’ algorithm, which means more of your content is featured in your fans’ newsfeeds.

2. Embed videos on your Facebook page. There is no reason why you should send people to YouTube to watch your videos. Keep ‘em right on your page with embedded videos! <good idea, and you can create a tab for YouTube videos within your FB Page too.

3. Create a connection between Facebook and the outside world. I recently read a case study about how sales reps worked with local retailers to promote their events through Facebook updates and photos. Consider something similar. <what’s worked for you?

4. Create contests on Facebook. Contests are a fun and engaging way to encourage participation from fans and even generate new fans. For example, in order to enter a contest, one company asked people to comment on a thread announcing a giveaway in Facebook. <See the success with the Shopping.com iPhone giveaway which took place alongside lots of ongoing comps – see Slideshare of the campaign

5. Integrate traditional advertising with Facebook. The Facebook icon/logo is well known. Add it to your print ads to promote your Facebook presence. Another great idea is to use traditional ads to promote contests that encourage people to sign up on your fan page. <and the granular targeting helps to keep costs down and engagement up

6. Use Facebook to grow your email list, and vice versa. Use your email newsletter to boost awareness of your Facebook page. In addition, promote your email newsletter to your existing Facebook fans. The end result will be growth in your email list and your Facebook fan base. <that’s a simple but great way to add ROI from Facebook growth..

7. Introduce new products on Facebook first. People who sign up to be fans of your Facebook page are likely your most loyal evangelists and customers. Reward them by giving them information about a new product/service/feature before everyone else. If you do it right, they will help you promote it to others. <exclusivity rules OK

8. Welcome new page visitors. When thinking about Facebook, a new metric comes to mind: visitor-to-like. As a B2B company, you ultimately want to maximize the percentage of people who visit your Facebook Page and click the “Like” button. One important way to achieve this goal and establish expectations with new fans is to implement a ‘welcome’ landing page that invites new visitors to Like your Page. Technically, there are many ways to execute this. HubSpot customers, for example, can install the free Facebook Welcome Application. <and you can use the Welcome Page to run comps too

9. Integrate social content on your Facebook Page. Facebook is the gateway to the internet for many people. They use it as a home base. In fact, one in eight minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook. Because Facebook has become such an online home for people, it is important to incorporate content from other social channels like YouTube and SlideShare to extend the life and reach of that content. <and not forgetting Twitter!

10. ‘Like’ other businesses’ Facebook Pages. Remember that social media is, well, social. By Liking the Pages of business partners, valued vendors, and customers, Facebook will notify the administrators of those Pages. In return, some of them may also decide to Like your Page, which will also expose it to the individual fans of their Pages. Think of this as leveraging Facebook for co-marketing efforts. <network with other potential partners via Facebook!

 

Are you listening hard enough?

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A while ago I went for an interview at social commerce innovators mydeco, who I really admire. I don’t recall who interviewed me at mydeco I do recall the useful feedback, which was that I listened too much in my interview. Funnily enough at a Shopping.com offsite in late 2010 in sunny Marbella I highlighted “listening” as a key strength during a cross-company workshop.

At a more recent meeting with a social media guru he asked me hypothetically what  I would say to a tea retailer client, armed with market research data which showed their customers drank a lot of tea at midnight. He believed the right answer was to advice the client that they need to produce a low-caffeine tea to meet the late night tea behaviour need.

My answer (OK, polished up a tad in hindsight) would be to make the strategic assumption that the tea customers knew they were drinking normal caffeinated tea at midnight; and start a discussion with the customers on that basis, before talking to the client as to how to develop their offering. How does that sound?

My one-liner taken from the '60 Insights from Experienced Community Managers eBook' published by Blaise Grimes-Viort

The value of listening in building a community isn’t just in terms of you as a CMO listening to what your customers say; it’s also the same mechanism which drives the value of a community in the interactions between members. Take the example of Stocktwits which I blogged about in 2008, and which I heard recently has also invested in UK-based City Index – currently loooking to recruit a social media planner. To quote Roger Ehrenberg, founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures from that time:

“Stocktwits massively leverages the power of the long tail, but the reason followers are able to rapidly identify value is because of reputation.

“THE STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY IS A MERITOCRACY. Those that hem and haw and say little don’t get followed. Those who are insightful, sharp and decisive command large readership. And this is the way it should be.

“We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Stocktwits community can and will become.  But the power of the platform is clear.”

Facebook Page campaign with added PR oomph!

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Just wanted to share a brief 9 slide presentation of the 4 week Facebook Page campaign I ran at Shopping.com, which for a modest investment of less than £1K returned over 5.5K ‘Likes’ and over 1.3K survey respondents – earning great online and offline PR. A big thanks to PayPal UK and to Dinesh for helping make it happen.

The trick was combining the Apple iPhone 4 offer in a visually dynamic email which included the call to action to complete the fun social shopping survey. We did not make it mandatory to complete the survey in order to take part in the giveaway as is often the case, in order to keep that spirit of customer engagement strong!

Facebook Page Campaign
View more presentations from Stuart Hall
BTW of course it really helps if you wear the right kind of cool shoes when creating a cool campaign. I went with Converse!

Driving SEO revenue from user generated content

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It’s great to come across a slide-share on the valuable topic of generating SEO revenue from your user generated content, as that’s certainly a topic I worked on at Shopping.com post-Google Panda to try and raise our ranking. What has used to be called social media optimization (SMO) has now migrated to the more specific term ‘social SEO’ in an era when reviews and guides are increasingly core to e-commerce success, and when getting full SEO value from them post-Panda can make a measurable dollar difference.

A top 40 comparison HD TV product guide enabled for SEO purposes on Shopping.com UK

There my approach was to research four or five keywords, based on a combination of share of voice (SOV) and keyword competition, using Google Adwords tool as the now defunct Google Wonder Wheel tool. I then employed Gemma and Tim at The Copywriting People to write guide text for a trial 40 comparison product guides using those chosen keywords, taking the choice of products from our most popular products for the month of May. What I have heard since then (thanks to this webinar with the founder of Trackur, from Hubspot: 23:00 mins) as a tactic to improve backlinks from top blogs is to use a social tracking tool based on keywords you are focusing on, and spotting when top bloggers are writing on a relevant subject. Then reaching out to them to see if they’d review your product, or leave a comment on that blog piece with a link back to your content without making the content too ‘spammy’. You can try this out with Alterian’s free SM2 tool for example.

To measure the effect I recorded the ranking of the products on Shopping.com UK and DealTime UK at the outset. Then with the aim of returning 6 weeks later to record the results. Want to know what happened? Me too!

For comparison check out the slideshare in question below from PowerReviews, which details how to self-assess your own ugc value for SEO – based on the estimate that 60% of US e-commerce sites which carry reviews don’t get full SEO value from them.

It may also worth checking out the Smart SEO tool launch by Bazaarvoice earlier this year. Clearly there’s a real demand for such a product/service in the marketplace, the trick as always is to match a method which fits your budget and delivers to your ‘social commerce‘ objectives.

Webinar: Social SEO – Drive More Traffic with User-generated Content

My CV in full

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STUART G. HALL @stuartgh

m: +44(0)7881 400679 e: stuarth@stuart-hall.com blog: www.stuart-hall.com

An award-winning social media professional, with cross-sector expertise spanning global e-commerce and consultancy roles, with a passion for collaboration and innovation.

SKILLS

  • Social media and community management strategy and practice, user-generated content, and community manager mentoring.
  • Metrics creation and reporting skills using both in-house and Google Analytics to demonstrate progress on community-specific and global e-commerce KPIs.
  • Extensive social marketing skills; integrating online campaigns with offline events.
  • Customer relationship and engagement management (social CRM).
  • Expertise in managing social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, YouTube, and WordPress.
  • Social media creation including blogging and videos; blogger management skills.
  • Social media monitoring skills, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
  • SEO skills in creating and reporting on organic and paid-for strategies, including page tag optimisation and SEO-friendly content creation.
  • Web content management skills including content strategy and implementation.
  • End-to-end contract, supplier and stakeholder management skills.
  • Proven team in-house/remote creative and technical staff management skills.
  • Project and product management skills, including using issue tracking and collaborative software tools.
  • Editorial skills, including interviewing, fact checking, copy writing, and production editing.

CAREER

Social Media Consultant – Plectic Ltd (2011 – date)
Developing a mobile social gaming product Name That Place, with partner discussions ranging from Tesco to Burberry.

Head of Marketing, Community & SEO – Shopping.com UK/eBay Inc. (June 2010 – Sept 2011)

Responsibilities:

  • To develop, lead and execute the social shopping/online community strategy to drive traffic and engagement with both the portal and Facebook community.
  • Establishing metrics and targets for social media & community, demonstrating local progress on global user generated content targets.
  • Developing and executing social media messaging for social media platforms; organising marketing events for the UK market with leading tech PR agency BallouPR.
  • Creating and implementing a SEO plan for the UK in line with organic traffic revenue targets.
  • Local implementation of the global social CRM content & community marketing strategy.
  • Inputting into the planning, budgeting, legal, and reporting processes in line with eBay UK policy and practice.

Results & Achievements:

  • Successfully met the user generated and professional content creation targets for reviews and guides using paid for promotions from Q3 2010 onwards, to time and within budget.
  • Increased the size of the opt-in email membership of Shopping.com UK by over 250%.
  • Developed the brand’s UK Facebook Page, growing the level of engagement and number of followers from 1K to 6.9K with a low-cost promotion; it also drove over 1.3K responses to a social shopping survey gaining both offline and online media coverage. (See Slideshare of campaign)
  • Leading the weekly global community manager ‘roundtable’ to help drive company-wide innovation and share good practice.
  • Took on the running of the company’s global customer engagement programme to help the business learn directly from its customers.
  • Led the UK response to Google Panda SEO changes, implementing an innovative ‘social SEO’ strategy to ameliorate the impact on SEO revenue. (Blog piece on my social SEO strategy)
  • Organised a successful ‘influencer’ blogger event with BallouPR to promote the brand.

LinkedIn recommendations for my work at Shopping.com.

 

Social Media Consultant – Plectic Ltd (Jan – June 2010)

Responsibilities:

  • Blogging on driving revenue through innovative community management strategies.
  • Produced five year social media strategy for international development charity Bond.
  • Marketing consultancy for document management start-up Docutiva.com.
  • Business development consultancy with innovative patient appointment reminder software BAM.
  • Business plan development and venture capital discovery with China-based surgical planning start-up Surgi-plan Medinfo Technologies – a web-based portal dedicated for the surgical planning sector to offer pre-operative planning software solutions.

Results & Achievements:

  • Shaping the current debate on community revenue generation, generating comments from leading practitioners in the US and UK.
  • Providing development charity Bond with its first ever comprehensive social media and community strategy.
  • Introduced BAM to a leading healthcare device provider Ultrasis.

Community Management Consultant – SiftGroups (Jan 2009 – Jan 2010)

Responsibilities:

  • Working with B2B clients to launch new online communities, including mentoring community managers on a weekly basis before and after launch.
  • Advising clients on how to implement a successful growth strategy, including running KPI workshops to integrate organisational and community metrics.
  • Developing and delivering standalone products to clients, including review and recommendations of existing social media offerings, quarterly health checks, and online training for social media and community managers.
  • Managing the work of junior community managers and co-ordinating internal developer work for client communities.

Results & Achievements:

  • Mentored the community managers of CIMA, NCVO and CMI, resulting successful community launches with CIMA achieving 12k members by the end of 2009.
  • Delivered social strategy and workshops for key B2B clients including the IET, OUP (in partnership with Socialtext) and the Law Society. Plus the FCO’s Chevening, and health charities including TalkTalk-sponsored Treehouse and the National Autistic Society.
  • Co-winner of the ‘Sift Innovation of the Year Award’ for co-creating a Drupal-based online community metric package, drawing on client input from NCVO.

Online Communities Manager – Institute of Chartered Accountants (Dec 2007 – Dec 2008)

Responsibilities:

  • Launching the community site IT Counts, including configuring the design and login to meet the needs of the business in partnership with Microsoft UK, co-creating the initial marketing & engagement proposition.
  • Engaging and generate interaction in the all the online communities; moderating and updating content, communicating with users, gathering feedback and input from community on site functionality and passing on to relevant business owners.
  • Working with ICAEW website editors to cross-promote the online communities throughout the organisation’s online presence.
  • Managing a team of professional bloggers to seed content and to sustain engagement through expert-led discussions.

Results & Achievements:

  • Achieved the target launch membership of 3k within half the time set for the IT Counts community, in collaboration with Microsoft UK.
  • Launched an additional series of niche communities, achieving a combined 27k membership by 2009.
  • Won the ‘Best New Web 2.0 Initiative’ for IT Counts in an industry-wide award, in partnership with WordFrame.

Global Site Manager – MedicExchange Plc. (Sept 2006 ­– Dec 2007)

Responsibilities:

  • Responsible for global site management, specifically the clinical content and site layout, in line with business strategy.
  • Analysing market feedback and develop a B2B mall strategy for each clinical community.
  • Implementing online & offline marketing initiatives, from launching the site after beta testing, producing e-mail bulletins to targeted professional audiences, to driving organic and paid-for SEO campaigns.
  • As a member of the business development team, it was my duty to share in the wider management of the commercial activities.

Results & Achievements:

  • Launched an innovative pay-per-click global e-commerce portal.
  • Successfully launched MedicExchange ar RSNA 2006, the largest medical event of its kind in the US.
  • Achieved a market value of $15m by 2007 by successfully building the brand through integrated online and offline marketing, including optimizing (including US real time feed and China content restirction issues) the use of expert content from Reuters Health to build credibility among professionals. (See AMEX: MGT)
  • Personally secured key partner BioMed Central to provide free high quality scientific content, thanks to their innovative use of open access publishing.
  • Led an online campaign to reverse an EU directive which threatened the use of MRI.

Freelance Projects (July 2006 – Sept 2006)

  • In partnership with the Works Software Ltd submitted a proposal for an innovative web 2.0 style shift handover software product originally developed by BP,
    Honeywell Control and the University of Cambridge, to the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Download the scorecard appraisal as a PDF (92kb). Despite the quality of the product the overall score for the submission (69.54%) was insufficent to take it to the next stage of development.

Social Media Consultant (Apr 2005 – June 2006)

  • Advised social media consultancy Headshift Ltd (now part of the US-based Dachis Group) on key health clients including the World Health Organisation and the NHS Connecting for Health, and blogged on UK health policy.
  • Usability and project management on a new website for the General Medical Council.

National Advisor – National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Sept 2000 – Apr 2005)

Responsibilities:

  • Creating, developing and managing content for the national programme’s high profile web presence.
  • Copyediting and proofread all web content, including managing freelancers, including writers, designers, and content supply from external organisations.
  • Tracking and report on all site metrics, implementing new marketing strategies.
  • Researching and creating database products to track and report data on the effectiveness of the national programme.
  • Contract tendering & implementation of content, database and re-design services for the series of five websites.
  • Lead responsibility for managing and recruiting team staff.
  • Training the national programme staff to use all new developments and online applications.

Results & Achievements:

  • Successfully integrated a series websites as part of a NHS corporate merger in 2005.
  • Won an IVCA accessibility award for knowledge portal Wired for Health in 2004.
  • Successfully managed tendering & implementation of content, database and re-design services for five websites with a £200k annual budget from 2002.
  • Presented a short paper on system design from my knowledge management experience at the International Nonlinear Sciences Conference in Vienna, 2003.

Communications Consultant (Apr 1996 – Sept 2000)

Responsibilities:

  • Promoting freelance communications consultancy with focus on health, not-for profit and health sectors through networking and marketing activities.
  • Securing core revenue through development of freelance journalism contracts.
  • Developing my skills and services from studying public relations, to researching online business opportunities.

Results & Achievements:

  • Launched Linux User magazine in early 2000 as part of the editorial team.
  • Communications consultancy for the Forster Company, including speech writing for Body Shop CEO Anita Roddick in 1997 on the emerging internet revolution.
  • Provided media training to mental health user groups and professionals across London for the national charity Mental Health Media in 1996, as well as helping organisation the Mental Health Media Awards.

Publications Manager – Release Ltd (Mar 1994 – Apr 1996)

  • Commissioned a series of visionary international white papers and took the initiative to publish them online in 1996, an innovation for national drugs charity Release.

News Editor – Red Pepper Ltd (Mar 1994 – Apr 1996)

  • Launched the current affairs magazine Red Pepper in 1994 achieving a ‘Best International Magazine’ award, and a circulation of 13k by 1995.

Senior Reporter – EMAP Norfolk & Suffolk Express Series (Mar 1992 – Apr 1994)

  • Won an EMAP award in 1993 for news reporting.

AWARDS

QUALIFICATIONS

  • MA in Social & Political Science, University of Cambridge: 1st class (Oct 1984 – June 1987)
  • Masters in Social Science in Industrial Archaeology, University of Birmingham (Sept 1987 – 1989)
  • National Certificate in Journalism (NCTJ), University of Wales Institute (Sept 1990 – Sept 1991)

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

  • British Computer Society, Internet Specialist Group; organised the ‘Social Networking & Web 2.0 within the Enterprise’ expert speaker meeting in Jan 2010.
  • Member of the Association of Online Community Professionals

SPEAKING EVENTS

PUBLICATIONS

INTERESTS

  • Archaeology, architecture, Brazil, cinema, comedy, complex systems, health, history, industrial design, innovation, online communities, popular music, psychology, soccer, and social media

DOWNLOAD MY CV

Dr Michael Fish is in the building

Please don’t let engineers take charge of the product

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And here’s why, from Douglas Edwards, Google’s brand manager from 1999 to 2005, who’s just written a book about his experience which he relates in this extract from an interview with FastCompany.

I mean, don’t engineers realize that most people run on different ‘software’ than code? And that this human software has its own inherent logic, which is different from the the logic of code?

“User interface was one realm where the communications team and the engineering team met each other halfway. Can you give an example of how you humanized Google?

“Here’s an example: the automated spellchecker. So Google had the capability of detecting if someone’s typed query was likely misspelled.

“The engineers said, ‘Great, if somebody misspells something, we should automatically correct it, do the correct search, and then tell them that they misspelled it, so they know we fixed it.’ The problem was, people don’t generally like to be told they made a mistake.

“The engineers insisted it was essential to tell the user they were wrong, so we launched with wording to that effect. But I knew from a marketing perspective that people would find that abrasive. And people were upset.

“They were pissed off that their search engine was correcting them–especially if they hadn’t made a mistake, if they were searching for a proper name that happened to be unique. Finally we changed it to softer phrasing. [Currently, Google says, “Showing results for...” and then the corrected query.]

“I remember arguing at the time, it doesn’t hurt us to take the blame–a search engine doesn’t have feelings. We should always be willing to take the hit, so the user feels better, even if they know they made a mistake.”

This isn’t a trivial issue when you consider how getting it right can impact on strategy & sales, and especially how you build a customer base. Just the other day I had my own small example of this when I sent out a newsletter with a call to action for the first 20 people who left a post on our Facebook Page Wall – in return for a ‘goody’ bag.

In the end 75 people asked for the giveaway. So are the 55 people who left a request simply to have their request be deleted on the grounds that they should have read the instructions, counted the numbers of posts, and not bothered once the list was 20 in total?

“Do not sell, absolute idiot” – An example of eBay seller feedback from 2005; eBay wisely removed the ability for seller’s to leave negative feedback in 2008.

OK, so coming back to Google, how about something really useful like a 73 page PDF on the best thinking and practice regarding customer engagement online? It’s called the rather cultish name ZMOT (zero moment of truth). So please enjoy – google-zmot.

It's like a MOT for your marketing:-)

I have already extracted  a few golden nuggets which I’d like to share – ’cause sharing as well as competition is good..

(1) Don’t ask the kind of customer survey question like ‘do you use a smartphone to shop online?’ ask the question ‘do you use a smartphone to help you decide what to buy?’

(2) “Yes, people take the time to leave messages online about how much they love Scotch Tape. That’s because the effort is down to zero.” In other words the full range of products, from the very small to the very large, generate user reviews and content.

I call it Sellotape!

(3) Actually, my third point isn’t from Google’s ZMOT but from the recent Lithium webinar ‘LevelUp Your Facebook Strategy’.

When guest contributor Jeremiah Owyang, in highlighting the 8 key criteria for success, focusing on point 4 around ‘Living authentically’ (what the social networking deal is all about) highlights a key point – that rather than merely emulate your customer’s behaviour online – you should aim to:

“Live in the same behaviors that customers and consumers are.”

Makes sense that being on the same wave length as your customers is going to work well for social media, and for the business bottom line. But as the introduction to the webinar plainly stated, customers have changed with social media and mobile technology but by and large business practice has not. It relates in large part to the follow-on criteria, to enable your customers to do it for themselves, to have discussions without relying on your input.

Quality starts at home!

Let’s face it while there are plenty of experts on the subject of business change in the era of social business how many actually confront what’s really holding things back? Letting go of that ‘elephant on the table’ both internally and externally with employees and customers goes to the heart of the matter, where the potential win is huge but the risks are big too. (Check out this post from Christoph Schmaltz on that subject, and how Headshift approaches these complex issues).

This is some text! text!This is why for example in a recent discussion ‘ I had with Phil Bush, director of strategic planning at Oracle, on the possibilities for enterprise use of social tools I focused on the key problem in integrating these transformative technologies in with business processes to drive results. And I’m guessing it’s probably what the CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff was referring to last week at Dreamforce 2011 when he wondered when the first CEO was going to suffer as result of his/her inability to engage using social tools with their customer and employees.

It ain’t easy. But one  tried and tested answer to help employees adapt to new ways of working is the practice of empowerment, which at its simplest as outlined in ‘Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute’ involves three basic principles:

1. Share information with everyone (externally, and internally)
2. Create autonomy through boundaries
3. Replace hierarchical thinking with self-managed teams

OK, sounds that’s one possible answer. But not everyone is convinced, and for good reason – the nature of how knowledge works in a networked world:

“Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  “Performance management, grade levels and compensation have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and in a networked world.”

Despite these objections hope remains so long as there is passion and determination to drive the business forward. Tying the power of consumer and business transformation together using social tools sounds utopian to some, but to others it’s the basis of their disruptive business model, as outlined in the recent Forbes piece ‘Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution’. Referring to HearsaySocial‘s internal social tool set it neatly makes that very link:

“Hearsay’s tools presume something elemental in a world of social power: that the empowerment of employees is directly tied to the empowerment of customers—because they will inevitably end up working, maybe even conspiring, together.”

Sounds like it’s time for action..@stuartgh

How to write a book on anything with minimum effort

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OK want to be a cool nerd who’s written a book on something like top ten conspiracy theories? It’s not as hard as it sounds:

1. Forget the notion that you need to do deep original research.

2. Buy the top ten books for your chosen subject.

3. Post a job to a freelance forum/mechanical turk with the job of someone else turning the books into a set of notes, combining common themes easily.

4. Read through the notes and turn them into text, so avoiding the charge of plagiarism. I did it all the time when a student at Cambridge University.

5. The originality simply comes from how you write the text, re-assemble the facts, and point out connections. You have to do this anyway to create a book from scratch.

6. Complete the writing, send to editor. Publish. Done.

My Obamicon

The power of online comparison

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Have you read the new report ‘Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth?’ from social search specialists Alterian which argues that the world of online marketing means big changes in terms of  delivering individualized marketing to consumers? Check it out here: Brands at risk (pdf, 1mb).

I was interested in the points made (jump to page 15) about price comparison and the power of finding similar folks and cross-checking with them, and using multiple sources of online information to make a purchase. Plus the point in the summary that never mind all the tech talk about the power of cloud technology, from a marketing perspective it is really about expressing/representing the individual.

The power of comparison

Consistent with our earlier findings, ‘formal messages from the company’ or ‘brand’ rate very low, with ‘advertising’ placed last with only 5% (4% UK, 6% US), seeing this as at all trustworthy. Second to last was ‘what the company says about itself’ with 8% (9% UK, 6% US), all well behind the hardly surprising ‘friends and family’ (40%).

Perhaps more interestingly was ‘professional reviews on the internet and magazines’ (28%) and the next most trusted source ‘people that are similar to me’ 19% (16% UK, 24% US). Recent research has indicated that, overall, people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped to 25%.

Importantly, Edleman* believes this can be interpreted as ‘it is a sign of the times, and the lesson for marketers is that consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it’.

Key Points

  • Empowered consumers are massively connected, always available, expect others to be available and are used to directly interact with content.
  • Individuals ‘assemble’ relationships/experiences/things about themselves in an on-demand manner, by doing so they build rich and highly personalized structures.
  • Devices and media are clustered round the individual, often providing a ‘rich tapestry’ of multi-mode/channel communications.
  • Many of these developments can be traced back to a growing social sense of individuality developed over several decades.
  • Social media is one manifestation of this much deeper social change.
  • Although the cloud potential of the media receives much attention it is really about expressing/representing the individual.
  • Much of the communication/engagement by the individual should be seen as a means to express and establish identity.
  • Building strong engagements requires organizations to interact at a personal level.
  • Trust is increasingly seen as something established in an interactive manner.
  • Beliefs or information are tested by verification from several sources, these may not all be in consistent agreement, the final choice arises from ‘active dialogue’.

* ‘In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust their Friends Less‘, Edleman Trust Barometer, in Advertising Age, (12-02-2010)

‘You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing’ vs ‘It’s SM2 (Social Media Rap)’

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Love this video from Hubspot dramatizing the value of inbound marketing.

But then in the face-off on the dance floor Alterian do a mean rap about their SM2 social media monitoring product: