The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking

It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate.

One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out

Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses.

Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%).

So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI.

ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce.

Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools? Where are you having success and where are you having trouble?

Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?

Will the Wall Street Journal Take a Real Shot at Social Media?

As I like to do when a post involves some ‘creative thinking’ I am warning you on this one. TechCrunch is ‘reporting’ the Wall Street Journal’s possible attempt at creating a social community (WSJ Connnect) that could compete with the LinkedIn set. I realize that outside of the Microsoft-Yahoo nuptials there has been little to discuss in the online marketing space as of late. With that in mind, since the TechCrunch piece includes the following it seems that it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is “strong interest” to move the project forward. Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper.

In the planning stages with a strong interest could be applied to the idea of just about anything in any company. That being said, the supposed “LinkedIn Killer” would be a replacement for the WSJ Community which is part of the current WSJ site. I am a fairly regular reader of the Wall Street Journal and I am a site subscriber. Those two pieces of data make the fact that I didn’t even know that the current WSJ Community even existed pretty poignant. Now that I have gone to the site to look for it specifically, I see the link but I must have developed “community blindness” or something like it.

News Corp., as a whole, is not known for their ability to capitalize on the social media space. They own MySpace and we all know how that has flourished under its guidance. They do own a company called Slingshot Labs which will be tasked with building this WSJ Connect product if it indeed does see the light of day so they will not develop this in house as they did with the WSJ Community effort.

So rather than wonder what might happen based on ex-MySpace employees seeking some mention on TechCrunch, let’s ask a few questions of you, the MP reader. Would there be any interest in this type of community for you personally? If this idea actually came to fruition and was launched, who would you see as the demographic? What can a social networking community do to set it itself apart and possibly lure away some of the 15 million visitors that LinkedIn gets monthly? Is there room for more “straight business” social communities?

These are the kinds of questions that News Corp. and the WSJ need to ask themselves before they fully commit. It will be somewhat interesting to see if there is truly an attempt made to get this type of offering off the ground. I have been told that regardless how crowded a market or an industry is there is always room for one more GOOD player. What it truly takes to be good in the social media space, however, may be a barrier to entry that few can overcome at this point in time.

Ning Rings VC Bell Again

With all of the talk regarding social media it seems that the inordinate amount of the attention goes to the big 2; Facebook and Twitter. While they do tend to generate significant drama and even some real news there is more to the social media space. In fact, there are those who see the social media universe fragmenting into very specific verticals so those of like mind can gather online without having to see that your friend just had a great breath of air. There’s got to be more right?

One of the biggest ‘sideline’ players in this space is Ning. They are doing very well despite some recent decline in numbers. They are doing so well that they picked up some more VC investment. The amount of the investment is not the focus, however, as pointed out over at AllThingsD. It’s the valuation that the investment is based on, which is a hefty $750 million. Not bad for getting just a small percentage of the attention that social media gets in the online press. For the uninitiated here is an overview of the company

Ning is working in a different corner of the social media space than the others

Ning is a platform aimed at offering customizable tools that lets users create their social networks about their interests, such as for fans of the movie “Twilight.”

Ning puts online ads on the sites, using Google (GOOG), and is also working on its own advertising platform. It also offers an array of other services and is planning more soon, such as a virtual gift offering.

Founded in early 2007, it currently has 29.3 million registered users, using 1.3 million social networks, and it adding one million registered users every 15 days, said the company.

Despite the positive news of investment interestTechCrunch reports

In the U.S., unique visitors actually declined 10 percent from May, 2009 to June, 2009, according to comScore. Ning had 5.1 million visitors in the U.S. in June (its worldwide audience is about three times as large).

The company attributes the decline to “some downtime in June as we expand and optimize our infrastructure to support the growth that we are expecting in the next 12 months.” Ning says it is adding 4,000 new Ning Networks every day and one million registered users every 15 days.

Ning lands this relatively small investment while it wasn’t even seeking more. Having Lightspeed Venture Partners on board, however, makes the roster of investors more impressive as the folks at Ning continue to grow their business. that can carry some value later on when they may actually look for money intentionally.

What is your experience with Ning? Do you have any experience at all with the service? What place does a service like Ning truly have? Ning CEO Gina Bianchini says that “We want to be the social network for interests and passions online.” Are there ways one can express passions online without such a service? Give us your passionate thoughts on the subject.

Top CEO’s Appear to be Anti Social (Media, that is)

With all the talk of social media this and social media that, it’s hard not to feel some pressure to be involved in some way or another. That is unless, of course, you are one of the CEO of some of the biggest companies in the world, as TechCrunch reports on a survey conducted by UBERCEO. Apparently the Top 100 companies of the Fortune 500 have CEO’s that are not getting in the game. Considering some of the press these guys and gals get these days that may be a good idea.

The highlights

• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
• 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.
• 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page.
• Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.
• Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog.

So is this a problem? Of course, that is a question that is open to opinion so let me chime in with mine. CEOs who run companies of any real influence should tread extremely lightly in the social media space. If the company is publically traded the risks involved, at least on the surface, seem to far outweigh the potential upside.

Let’s be realistic as well. Does anyone really think that they are going to become a “bff” of a CEO just through social media? Is this the new way to get from the mail room to the boardroom in today’s corporate world? Not likely.

Also, there is a better than fair chance that when a CEO is actually involved in this kind of medium, many would suspect that it wouldn’t really be the CEO doing the work. You can’t turn around without hearing the cries of “There are not enough hours in the day to keep up with social media!” so the likelihood of a busy CEO carving out some time to tweet or post or update anything is not real high. One side effect of the ridiculous amount of information that is available to everyone today is the increasingly high level of skepticism that comes along with it. Why have to try to prove that you (if you are that CEO actually making the social media effort) are really the one sending tweets and updating their Facebook page?

Social media efforts have to be careful to not run too far ahead of themselves. There needs to be a lot of crawling before a full sprint social media effort by anyone is undertaken. Based on that, it might be wise to keep the CEO’s to their regular jobs. A lot of good work can be undone real quickly by one bad moment from the C-suite that is broadcast to the world via social media channels. Why risk that?

Forrester Report: Here Come the Mobile & Social Media Ads!

OK, so we already know that online advertising spending in 2009 is likely to be lower than 2008, but where exactly will companies funnel their ad dollars?

According to Forrester, if you’re in the mobile marketing or paid social media space, the glass is either half-empty or half-full.

It’s a half-empty kind of world, if you consider that these two verticals are currently under-funded by companies of all sizes. It’s a half-full world, if you take the view that there’s plenty of growth left in these areas–and companies appear to be ready to invest in them over the next 12 months.

So, where does that leave email and search marketing? Are we close to topping out?

Twitter Study Shows that Tweets are Few and Far Between

If you are in the social media space you would look at this headline and ask “What is he smoking?” There is no way that most people don’t produce many tweets because how else can the tweet stream be more cluttered and crowded than the start of the New York City Marathon?

HarvardBusiness.org reports on a study of a significant sized sample of Twitter users. They intro their findings with

We examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. We then compared our findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. Our findings are very surprising.

Surprising? What’s surprising about Twitter any more? Don’t we already know everything about Biz and Ev and the cool kids in San Francisco? Despite the service being around since March of 2006 as Twitter (it was part of Obvious Corporation before that) its recent rise to stardom has created, among other things, a lot more users, a lot of confusion and a growing mountain of research.

Add to the list this study that was produced by a Harvard MBA candidate and an Assistant Professor of Strategy who teaches a class on Competing with Social Networks. The highlights:

• 80% are followed by or follow at least one user
• Men have 15% more followers than women and are hunters meaning they are driven more by numbers than relationships. The study suggests

Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.

• Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

These are all interesting but the one that will be of most interest to Pilgrims is that

There is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

So much for the 80/20 rule. What does this say about Twitter? Is it still a small community of real heavy users that assume that the rest of the world is as interested in them as they are themselves?

What does this suggest to marketers? Quite possibly it may be time to hit the brakes a little on the actual reach of Twitter. From a business perspective it seems to be more effective to build your Twitter following in a Pied Piper kind of fashion rather than fishing for people who may be interested in your business. There simply may not be that many people actively using the service yet. You need to lead them to it for the specific reason that you will help them in some way. There is real value to both parties in a situation like that.

Look at Comcast. They took a history of bad customer service and turned it into a following of people who appreciate their outreach. You gotta figure that many of those followers were not on Twitter until Comcast started providing service to customers on it. Either that or among the 20,000 plus followers of @comcastcares are just more social media types who are trying to keep busy.

So the never ending dilemma of what is the business value of Twitter continues and will for quite some time. With social media there is no right or wrong, there is no up or down there is only doing and finding out what actually works for each individual situation. I’m going to start selling antacids and sleep aids to marketing executives for obvious reasons.

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