Viral Video & Social Media Marketing Up
A survey from Association of National Advertisers (ANA), BtoB Magazine and ‘mktg’ indicates that marketers are turning to viral videos and social media marketing more and more, despite continued reservations.
Two-thirds of marketers surveyed said they were using SMM, up from only 20% of marketers in the 2007 survey. The most popular social sites for marketers were Facebook (74%), YouTube (65%), Twitter (63%), and LinkedIn (60%). Only a quarter of marketers were using viral video in 2007; now half are using this tactic. But marketers are concerned about how effective these techniques are:
Despite the growing use of social networks and viral videos, marketers do not think they are using these media in the most effective ways and are still struggling with measurement and media-mix allocation issues. The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI (45%) and worries about not having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43%).
On the other hand, the most effective of the newer media platforms are those which marketers have been doing for longer periods of time and those for which more measurable results are available:
- Search engine marketing (SEM) (65%)
- Own website (59%)
- Search engine optimization (seo) (55%)
- E-mail marketing (45%)
Naturally, these new efforts have to be paid for. In February, the ANA reported the 77% of marketers were reducing their media budgets this year. However this study indicated that “55% of respondents have shifted funds from their traditional media budget, while 48% shifted funds from other marketing communications budgets. More than one-forth of marketers (26%) created an incremental budget.”
And what’s coming up? Next year, the top new formats (for marketers not currently using them) were blogs (34%), mobile (28%) and social media (23%). But the most money will be going to clients’ websites (26%), SEM (19%) and online display (17%).
Are you still doubting the value of social media? Omniture has a new webinar available on the value of social media, with hard data on just the impact social media has had on companies like National Geographic (to the tune of >2500 subscriptions in one day). You know how I love data!
What do you think? Have you seen an increase in your SMM or viral video marketing? Are you concerned about their effectiveness?
Google Launches Easily Embeddable Web Elements at I/O 2009
The only really exciting thing you missed by not attending Google’s I/O 2009 developer event was the chance to get a free Android phone–apparently Google can give them away after all! 
The annual event is not as glamorous as Google’s other conferences, but if you dream in binary, then the chance to mingle with 3,000 other developers and listen to 130+ speakers would have been a delight for you.
For the rest of us, Google did make three announcements today.
Perhaps the most interesting for us non-developer types, Google Web Elements allow you to incorporate Google products–like Maps, News, Friend Connect and YouTube–right onto your own website. They require no programming knowledge; all you need to do is use the customization wizard and Google automatically generates a snippet of text to paste on your page.
It works like this:
And looks like this:
The other two announcements may cause drowsiness…
- Java Language Support in App Engine: Today Google is launching general availability of Java language support in Google App Engine, providing all developers with an end-to-end Java language solution for building AJAX web applications.
- Android Developer Challenge 2: Today Google is announcing the second phase of the Android Developer Challenge, a Google-funded initiative to reward developers for building innovative and useful applications for the Android mobile platform.
