Situation:

Microsoft was facing severe customer issues.  Their partner base had ballooned to 180,000 and they were facing support and satisfaction issues.  Based on an internal survey they conducted, 64% of their partners were less than satisfied and another 62% wanted better support and information.  Furthermore, the survey revealed the perception from their global partners was that Microsoft didn’t care enough, provided minimal proactive communication, and treated their partners as an afterthought.*

Action:

They decided to take the conversation to where their partners and customers were; social media.  They used social to allow for questions and comments, creating an environment where there could be a free exchange of information and rich dialogues.

Twitter was a big hit; they used deep links to drop their support customers directly into actual answers to common questions and issues.  They setup blogs to give another avenue for the free flow of information.  It was important to allow their partners to select how and where they interacted.   They also allowed their users to select the language they wanted to read and interact in, another big hit within their vast global community.

Another key action was monitoring and reacting to feedback and results.  Content and social strategy is fluid, you need to continuously ‘read and react’ to ensure that you are being efficient with your communication and information.

Result:

As a result they saw a 15% lift in their satisfaction ratings in the first year and a 17% lift in the second year.  They were successful in driving their users to their main service internet site (“Home Base”), seeing a 400% increase in traffic.  This success resulted in a 30% drop in call service volume.  They also witnessed a 54% YOY growth in their social media engagement.*

Key Learnings:

• Give them options:  Let your partners and customers choose how and where they want to interact
• Be authentic:  Sometimes you need to admit your mistakes and be forward and honest.  Ensure your employees recognize that they are representing the brand and not themselves.
• Develop a kinship:  Sometimes you need to let your partner lead.  You need to show up in both the good times and the bad times.
• Deep links to resources:  Provide one click access to commonly requested information; it will save you and your customer’s valuable time.
• Social and content strategy is fluid:  You are never really done, monitoring and strategy shifts are needed.  But make sure to celebrate milestones along the way, build on your successes.

Great social media infographic highlighting that social media’s impact on the world is still in its early stages. Social media growth infographic courtesy of SEJ.

Source: The Growth of Social Media: An Infographic

As the projected valuations of social media behemoths such as Facebook continue their breathtaking ascent above companies which were once considered cornerstones of the American economy, it has become increasingly clear that finance will play an ever-larger role in the sphere of social media. However, what is less apparent, and quite possibly equally important, is the role that social media will play in finance.

At first glance the relationship is obvious; financial markets are thought to be driven by the perpetual flow of new information and social media provides this flow in near (if not actual) real-time. For those in the financial community who base decisions on real-time information, the value of social media is well defined.

If social media’s relationship with finance were simply fashioned as a means of obtaining real-time news; it would serve a function, but not necessarily fill a void. In truth, software offered by traditional news outlets, such as Bloomberg Professional, already provide breaking, up to the minute news feeds quite competently (albeit at a hefty price tag).

Recent research is beginning to shed light on a new and possibly game-changing role for social media in finance. In late 2010, Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiao-Jun Zeng published a paper in the Journal of Computational Science, giving cause to believe that social media is quite possibly providing a service that goes far beyond real time news – astonishingly, it may in fact be predicting price changes in the stock market.

During the course of their study, the three researchers evaluated nearly ten million tweets over a nine month period of time in 2008. The authors used a program to comb through tweets gathered over each individual day of that period. This program only collected and organized tweets pertaining to certain keywords which express different emotional states. Based on the frequency of a particular emotion tweeted during the previous three days, the researchers predicted the direction of the stock market on the fourth day. Using this approach, they correctly predicted the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing price nearly 3 out of 4 times, or 73.3% of the time. Even more remarkably, 86.7% of the time they were able to nail the direction of the DJIA close, 3 to 4 days in advance (you’ll want to check out an article written by Socionomics Institute for a more in depth look at this research – Socionomics Institute is in no way related to Socialnomics).

The implications of this study are profound. It could very well mean that stock markets are influenced by social mood. This directly contradicts the inverse mainstream belief that the mood of a society is influenced by the stock market. In other words, we are learning that society is not gloomy because the stock market is slumping, but rather that the stock market is slumping because society is gloomy.

Most simply, this ground-breaking research also implies that social media could play a huge role in the sphere of finance through the years to come. It appears that we have only scratched the surface in discovering and analyzing this relationship. If social media does in fact have the ability to predict price movements in stock markets, it’s role in finance has unlimited potential.

Naturally, a hedge fund hoping to capitalize on the prospective success of social media in finance has quickly sprouted. The Derwent Absolute Return Fund Ltd is in the process of establishing a fund that plans to aggregate tweets to gauge market sentiment in hopes of predicting price changes in the stock market. The fund was due to launch in early April but this date was pushed back because of higher than expected investor interest. They have chosen to restructure the fund to accommodate the increased demand.

As further studies continue to shed light on the relationship between social media and finance, new social media start-ups are hoping to help. Online social communities, engaged specifically and entirely in the realm of finance, could be used much like Twitter in evaluating the sentiment of society to ultimately predict market movements.

Shmish.com, which launched in early May, is a social news site dedicated to the sharing of finance related news. The user-base is currently too small to accurately measure the sentiment of the financial community. However, being that Shmish is focused entirely on the sphere of finance and is built on an easy to navigate, user-friendly, intuitive platform – it’s a likely candidate to harbor future studies of social news and its predictive abilities.

As it is often quipped in financial circles – there is no ‘holy grail’ approach to market analysis. That being said, social media may prove to be an immeasurably valuable tool in helping to understand underlying market sentiment and in turn predicting price movements of the stock market.

So stay social. Share, vote and comment in communities like Shmish. Our collective thoughts just may prove to be priceless.

Later this week I’ll detail out what each company does. Any I missed?

——————————————————————–

Sources: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics Twitter: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/twitter-users/ /Linkedin: http://press.linkedin.com/ /Foursquare: http://aboutfoursquare.com/fourmillionsquare/ / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet / Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About / Photobucket: http://blog.photobucket.com/blog/2010/10/index.html / Myspace: http://scottelkin.com/programming/aspnet-20/myspace-statistics/ / Orkut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut

Written by Cidney Carver

Cid is a contributing columnist to Socialnomics helping to give a Generation Y and Z perspective on digital trends.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

By Erik Qualman

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves!  As many of the statistics from the original Social Media video have changed, I took a moment to refresh the video with a few new statistics and graphics.  Thanks to all of you for your support in making the first Social Media Revolution and Social Media ROI videos such a huge success and I hope that you enjoy this refresh!

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Social Media Statistics:

Below are the sources I used to compile this video.  Keep your feedback/questions/challenges coming as it will collectively make the next video better – be social.

A huge thanks to all below:

1. Source: http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/broker http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.php  [roughly 52% based on table data] | 2010 U.S. 310,232,863 | 2010 World 6,814,609,654 | 30 and under: 3,548,760,268 / 6,814,609,654 = 52% http://sasweb.ssd.census.gov/idb/worldpopinfo.html
2. Source: Grunwald Associates National Study – Trendsspotting Blog | Millenials Conference
3. Source: Hitwise Intelligence Heather Dougherty http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2010/03/facebook_reaches_top_ranking_i.html
4. Source: Huffington Post
5. Source: McKinsey Study also posted by David Dalka
6. Source: First Stats: United Nations Cyberschoolbus Document
7. Source for Facebook Stat: Facebook Timeline http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline Feb 2009 175 million users – Feb 2010 400 users:
8. iPhone Stat: Apple
9. Personal Quote
10. Source: Facebook and world population data
11. Source: TechCrunch
12. Source: U.S. Department of Education Study
13. Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey
14. Source: Inside Facebook Blog
15. Source: Twitter & World Population Data [Pulled 4/11: Kutcher & Spears 4,743,902 and 4,689,808 = 9,433,710] – note it’s not the combined populations of the countries listed
16. Source: The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/feb/08/facebook-rise-mobile-web-use
17. Source: Metro Commuter Newspaper
18. Source: USA Today: Should Colleges Start Giving iPads to Students? http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-04-05-IHE-colleges-give-iPads-to-students05_N.htm
19. Opinion, not a statistic
20. Source: TGDaily
21. Source:  Mashable by Ben Parr
22. Source: www.wikipedia.org - calculated based on # articles per language category; Colorado State University Wikipedia Accuracy Study; open debate and of course very biased information is also found on this Wikipedia Accuracy page.
23. Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia
24. Opinion, not a statistic
25. Source: ClickZ Stats SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
26. Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org
27. Source:  TechCrunchThis says 4 weeks so I may have been a little off here as my source at Facebook had said 2 weeks adjusted above
28. Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
29. Opinion, not a statistic
30. Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (actually 90% now – updated above but video still shows 78%)
31. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
32. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
33. Source: Starcom USA-TiVo
34. Source: Mashable
35. Source: Solutions Research Group
36. Source: Facebook Stats
37. Opinion, not a statistic
38. Opinion, not a statistic
39. Opinion, not a statistic
40. Opinion, not a statistic
41. Opinion, not a statistic
42. comScore
43. Music in video provided by Fatboy Slim “Right Here, Right Now” (1999) – if you like it buy the single

To watch videos with millions of YouTube views and deservedly so, please check out Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod’s Did You Know? And Shift Happens videos on YouTube.  If you are like me you will love them!

Also, if you haven’t seen Marta Kagan’s “What The F**K is Social Media” presentation,  it’s amazing! Many of the same eye-popping facts are contained in it – as well as many more.  Plus, it does a much better job of providing insight than my video which is designed to grab attention.  Kagan’s presentation informs, check it out!

by Erik Qualman

A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media?  Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?”  Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face.  Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”

To borrow from the Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Benjamin Zander, there are those in life that sit in the back row with their arms folded, judging, and complaining.  Then there are those that sit in the front row with a vision and they are spending their energy on making that vision a reality.  This article and video have been put together with the hopes of it being a viable tool for those with a vision to get those seated in the back row to stand up and see the social media light.

Drafting off the success of the Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution Video – over 1.2 million views and counting – thanks for the support!  This newest video Socialnomics: Social Media ROI showcases that social media can help you achieve success on almost any front.  While the video uses familiar nomenclature like ROI, many pieces of social media behave so differently than anything we have ever seen, that I prefer to use “What does or will success look like?” rather than “What’s the ROI?”

After all, why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel?  Social media touches every facet of business and it should be viewed more as an extension of good business ethics.  Which, if done properly, will harvest sales down the line.  Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky puts it best when he states:

“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.” – Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky

However to speak in a business vernacular that is more readily understood today please find below some salient examples and data points which are found in the video:

1.  Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

2.  Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.  Gary’s eccentric personality and offbeat oenophile knowledge have proven a natural path to success with his Wine TV Library.

3.  Vaynerchuk found first hand that $15,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, $7,500 Billboard = 300 new customers, $0 Twitter = 1,800 new customers.

4-5.  Wetpaint/Altimeter Study found companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media significantly surpass their peers in both revenue$ and profit$.  The study also found the company sales with the highest levels of social media activity grew on average by +18%, while those companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline -6%.

6.  Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers

7-8.  Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper.  The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value.  Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)

9.  BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.

10.  Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter

11.  To put things into perspective, only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.  This is where the majority of media dollars reside today.  I don’t believe the majority of media dollars will reside there tomorrow.

12-14:  “You can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other,” says James Farley, CMO Ford.  Ford seems to know what they are doing, especially with Scott Monty leading the social media charge.  By giving away 100 Ford Fiestas to influential bloggers, 37% of Generation Y were aware of the Ford Fiesta before its launch in the United States.  Is it any wonder why 25% of Ford’s marketing spend has been shifted to digital/social media initiatives?  Ford is the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.

15.  Naked Pizza, a New Orleans Pizzeria that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media.  In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.”  On top of that (no pun intended) 85% of their new customers were from Twitter.  So, yes, social media does work for small businesses.  Feel free to have a bottle of Vaynerchuk wine with your pizza.

16.  Volkswagen goes 100% Mobile for launch of GTI.  The reason that I mention this is that mobile drives social media usage and social media usage drives mobile.  More and more we will see most social media usage on the phone.

17.  Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.  As a result of retweets from such notables as @mashable, @G_man, @zaibatsu and others, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.

18.  Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago.  Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.  “Live Community” allows customers to ask other customers questions which has proved both beneficial to the customer and to Intuit.  In some instances, the customer can answer questions that Intuit isn’t allowed to answer because of regulatory restrictions.

19.  Software company Genius.com reports that 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities

20-23.  During Barack Obama’s rise to the White House, he garnered 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button.  Most importantly this resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.

24.  The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center witnessed a 9.5% increase in registrations by using social media.

25-28.  Web host provider Moonfruit more than recouped its $15,000 social media investment as their Website Traffic soared +300% while correspondingly sales increased +20%.  They also saw a huge lift in their organic search engine rankings getting on the first page for the term “free website builder.”

29.  eBay found participants in online communities spend 54% more money

30.  Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky puts it best when he states: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”

31.  “Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine.” – Morgan Johnston, JetBlue

32.  71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It

33.  “Our head of Social Media is the customer” – McDonald’s

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A tremendous thanks to all the below social media luminaries! [if anything is incorrect please let me know]

1.   Jon Swartz, “More marketers use social networking to reach customers,” USA Today, 8/28/09

2.  Lee Oden, “Book Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk,” Online Marketing Blog

3.  Jan M. Rosen, “Be It Twittering or Blogging, It’s All About Marketing,” New York Times, 3/11/2009

4-5.  Wetpaint/Altimeter Group Engagement db study, 2009 http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/social-media-engagement-directly-linked-to-financial-success-9858/ & http://www.altimetergroup.com/2009/07/engagementdb.html

6.  Jon Swartz,  “More marketers use social networking to reach customers,” USA Today,  8/28/09

7.  http://www.advertolog.com/burger-king/print-outdoor/whopper-sacrifice-316211/

Estimate based on taking 32 million impressions at an average CPM of $13 based on eMarketer estimate found here. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007053  Less than $50,000 is a very conservative estimate (probably cost much less) to actually build the application + the cost to Burger King to give out less than 20,000 coupons/whoppers.  Please note these are estimates, but they error on the conservative side.

8.  Based on state populations of Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

9.  Kristen Nicole, “Will It Blend” Videos Boost Sales 5x,” Mashable, 9/27/2007

10.  Claire Baldwin, “Twitter helps Dell rake in sales,” Reuters, 6/12/2009

11.  “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007

12-14.  David Kiley, “Ford Spending 25% of Marketing on Digital and Social Media,” BusinessWeek, 10/16/2009 http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/10/ford_spending_2.html

15.  Jacob Morgan, “Two Examples of Companies Measuring Social Media ROI,” Social Media Globetrotter, 10/12/2009http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/two-examples-of-companies-measuring-social-media-roi/

16.  Karl Greenber, “VW Goes All Mobile For Launch Of GTI,” MarketingDaily, 10/22/2009 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115919

17.  Interactive Agency (Atlanta, GA)

18.  Intuit Inc. (Mountain View, CA)

19.  “Increase B2B Lead Generation Using Social Media,” Social Media B2B, 7/14/2009 http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/07/b2b-lead-generation-social-media/

20-23:  Jose Antonio Vargas, “Obama Raised Half a Billion Online,” Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html

24.   Ed Bennett, “Hospitals and Social Media,” SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/edbennett/hospitals-social-media

25-28.  Daniel Adler, “Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips,” Forbes, 7/31/2009 http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/31/top-twitter-tips-entrepreneurs-technology-twitter.html

29.  Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples,” ReadWriteWeb, 6/12/2009 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_roi_dells_3m_on_twitter_and_four_bett.php

30.  Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman, Cripin + Poter & Bogusky

31.  Daniel Adler, “Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips,” Forbes, 7/31/2009 http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/31/top-twitter-tips-entrepreneurs-technology-twitter.html

32.  Social Media in the Enterprise White Paper by Vignette Software, 2/2009 http://www.vignette.com/dafiles/docs/Downloads/Social-Media-in-the-Enterprise.pdf

a) free information about potential product/service deficiencies

b) gives them a chance to correct the problem

c) it’s an opportunity to shine with the customer in a public forum by listening & responding

d) creates a seamless path to have an ongoing conversation with the customer

Well, if you still aren’t sold by the above reasons than you may be persuaded by this:  having reviews, even those with negative comments, actually helps drive more sales.  At least one small business owner found this out first hand.  The story and findings are highlighted in a timely CNNMoney article by Jennifer Alsever ["Even bad reviews boost sales"].

The article points out that AlpacaDirect saw sales climb 23% on items that had customer reviews, even for products receiving bad customer reviews like the golf cardigan which received a few three out of five star ratings for being “kinda sweaty” and a “poor fit.”  The article has a few other helpful tidbits and is worth a read.

It’s funny that several years ago when company’s received feedback in the mail (yes the kind with a stamp on it) whether it was good, bad or indifferent, they were excited.  After all, they actually received some form of feedback.  Well, it’s time to get excited about real-time customer feedback via social media, even the negative kind.

Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?  Welcome to the Social Media Revolution:

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
13. 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

1. Source: Grunwald Associates National Study – Trendsspotting Blog | Millenials Conference
2. Source: Huffington Post
3. Source: McKinsey Study also posted by David Dalka
4. Source: First Stats: United Nations Cyberschoolbus Document
   Facebook Stat: Mashable
   iPhone Stat: Apple
5. Source: Facebook
6. Source: TechCrunch
7. Source: comScore
8. Source: U.S. Department of Education Study
9. Source:  Attempting to relocate
10. Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey Note: 80% will use social networks in their assessment.  95% will use LinkedIn in their assessment.  When we revise the Video needs to be updated changing “their” to “a” primary tool need to see if we bump 80% to 95%
11. Source: Inside Facebook Blog
12. Source: Twitter & World Population Data
13. Source: Attempting to relocate
14. Source: Metro Newspaper
15. Opinion, not a statistic
16. Source: TGDaily
17. Source: www.wikipedia.org - calculated based on # articles per language category; Colorado State University Wikipedia Accuracy Study; open debate and of course very biased information is also found on this Wikipedia Accuracy page.  If I had to do it again I would have made this say as accurate rather than more – obviously some articles will be more accurate (think of the realtime update of Michael Jackson’s death, but also some will be less accurate.
18. Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia
19. Source: ClickZ Stats SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
20. Opinion, not a statistic
21. Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org
22. Source:  TechCrunchThis says 4 weeks so I may have been a little off here as my source at Facebook had said 2 weeks adjusted above
23. Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
24. Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3
25. Opinion, not a statistic
26. Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (actually 90% now – updated above but video still shows 78%)
27. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
28. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
29. Source: Starcom USA-TiVo
30. Source: Nielsen
31. Source: Solutions Research Group
32. Source: Henry Blodget Silicon Alley Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-kindle-sales-now-a-shocking-35-of-book-sales-when-kindle-version-available-2009-5 Just as the URL shows it’s not 35% of all books sales, but rather if a Kindle Version and a Book Version are available the buyer selects the Kindle version 35% of the time.
33. Source: Yahoo Finance
34. Opinion from Socialnomics
35. Source: Facebook
36. Music in video provided by Fatboy Slim “Right Here, Right Now” (1999) – if you like it buy the single

If anyone sees any inaccuracies or has better source information please let me know!

Also, if you haven’t seen Marta Kagan’s “What The F**K is Social Media” presentation,  it’s amazing! Many of the same eye-popping facts are contained in it – as well as many more.  Plus, it does a much better job of providing insight than my video which is designed to grab attention.  Kagan’s presentation informs, check it out!

To watch a video with millions of YouTube views and deservedly so, please check out Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod’s Did You Know? It is filled with compelling stats that relate to globalization, education and technology – Love it!

Other trending posts: Pippa Middleton

Push play to see “Social Media Revolution” video that quickly displays relevant social media statistics and comparisons to other industries for context.