As part of a comprehensive global survey of forward-looking business leadership, IBM spoke to 1,700 CEOs from 60 countries, in 18 industry sectors, and found two somewhat surprisingly impactful conclusions about the future of social. The first is that social media engagement with customers will soon be more important than face-to-face interaction. The second, as a result, CEOs aim to significantly escalate their level of social media engagement with customers over the next five years.

This survey though comes with a big BUT. While CEOs see the power of social engagement, they are less bullish on social media’s influence on customer decisions. Specifically, 45% of CEOs polled said social media was one of the three most important customer channels now, but only 10% said it would be in 3-5 years time.

The IBM study drills down further into where CEOs in the UK and Ireland feel lie the potential and obstacles in their business as we shift to a more social world. The upshot? UK and Ireland companies need a better understanding of their customers to help forge closer connections and stronger relationships.

• UK and Ireland CEOs see customer relationships and human capital as the most important drivers of sustained business success (63% said these factors were key drivers of sustained economic value)
• Customers are seen as the most important part of businesses to invest in understanding better according to 75% of UK and Ireland CEOs

On innovation and partnenrship working as an essential source of development and growth:

• For the first time, UK and Ireland CEOs identify technology as the most important external force impacting their organisations – even more than shifting economic and market conditions (76% said technology was one of the most important factors, against 63% for macroeconomic factors)
• UK and Ireland CEOs value business partnerships more than their global peers;  47% rate business partnership networks as an important source of economic value compared to the global average of 28%
• 84% of UK and Ireland CEOs plan extensive external partnerships over the next five years vs. a figure of 69% globally

Here’s an infographic that sums much of this up:

The traffic-driving impact of The Big 3 social networks – today, let’s rank them as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – is being constantly measured, calibrated, then re-measured and re-calibrated, it seems. This is important as marketers want to know on which networks it would be wisest to maintain a vibrant presence. The answer: all three. But it’s clear that one of these Big 3 is not just driving traffic, but big-ticket sales. Hint: it ends with “interest.”

The latest data come from social commerce platform enablers at Shopify. Shopify analyzed traffic data from over 25,000 Shopify online stores and drew the following interesting conclusions. It writes on its blog:

…referral traffic from Pinterest to Shopify stores is equal to traffic coming from Twitter. Of that traffic, shoppers are 10% more likely to make a purchase compared to those who arrive from other social sites. Furthermore, of those purchases, the average order is $80 which is double the average order from Facebook. Pinterest has already become a huge player in the world of ecommerce.

Here’s the breakdown in, yep, infographic format:

As we write, the world is playing countdown to the biggest tech IPO in a decade. In a matter of hours, we’ll know how many billions (north of $100 billion) will add up to the value of Facebook. As we ponder all those zeros, here’s an interesting infographic on the 901 million-pound gorilla’s globe-spanning growth.

The infographic is courtesy of the social media data junkies at Socialbakers. It’s called “Think Global. Act Global: How big brands are taking Facebook marketing to the next level.”  As the name implies, it shows the emergent markets that will dictate the Facebook growth story over the next year, something marketers investors will be keen to follow. Of course, it comes just as we continue to debate whether it was a smart move or not for General Motors to pull all upcoming ad purchases on Facebook. A look at the global reach figures below and you have to think GM will be pulling an about-face in the months to come.

For some time now we’ve been delivering to SMI readers a “Social Media by the Numbers” roundup, a summary of the big numbers and the big picture that are driving social.  Our newsletter subscribers know this well as they get it in their in-box at the start of every week. It’s proved so popular we thought it would be a nice idea to give you a longer version this morning. Enjoy!

Again, the biggest take-away for you is this: If you find this kind of numbers-driven reportage of value, why not subscribe to the SMI newsletter where you’ll get these timely updates sent straight to you at the start of each week?

Let’s get started:

1.5 million – the number of fans who voted in a crowdsourced effort to build the perfect burger in a new social media campaign by McDonald’s Germany. There is a lot on the line. It’s being called ‘McDonald’s first crowdsourced burger.’

60% – of the shoppers who boast about a new Fendi or Prada or Burberry (or, insert luxury label here), 60% prefer to do so on Facebook. The full infographic on luxury brands can be found here.

33% – the number of companies using video this year to engage with customers and built thought-leadership cred. Video is at least as popular as display and pay-per-clicks advertising, and now more popular than commissioning white papers, the research found.

4,292 to zero – This may be the most impressive Tweets-to-follower ratio of all: Goldman Sachs’ Twitter channel has attracted this many followers despite not posting a single Tweet. Ever. Probably the first order of business then for the Wall Street giant’s future social media community manager.

61.94% – This is the percentage of quarter-on-quarter growth Ford Mustang saw on its Facebook page at the end of Q1, the same quarter the new Facebook Timeline went into effect. Why the jump? Check out the full story on how the auto sector is driving engagement in the new pic-friendly world of Facebook fan pages.

40% – The percentage of Twitter users who regularly patrol Tweet streams in search of products or services. This figure we plucked from an interesting infographic describing the future of the social customer.

46.4 million – the number of Western Europeans who use their smartphone for gaming, up an impressive 50% year-on-year. The Brits and Italians lead the league table.

£20 – Here’s a social commerce campaign worth noting: UK grocer Hello Fresh dangled £20 worth of “coupon” discounts last week to its Facebook fans and scored an impressive bump in engagement.

20% – For you data junkies, this figure represents the “average conversion rate” some retailers are seeing thanks to the new Facebook Timeline.

$1.7 billion – the size of the in-app advertising market, thanks the the explosion in apps and game downloads. In-app ad revenue in North America and Western Europe has more than doubled year-on-year. The full outlook for the mobile media market can be found here.

75% – of online purchase intentions are never fulfilled. Why? One big reason is the hassle of having to register. Here’s a fascinating piece of analysis that looks at why social log-ins could propel online commerce to a new level.

62% – of Fortune 500 companies maintain an active Twitter presence, new research shows. This is up from 60% in the year prior, 2010. Retailers top the Twitter-savvy list. The industry at the bottom may surprise you: telecommunications. To see where your sector lands check out the full research.

… and here’s a bonus number for you:

12 – as in June 12th, the date of Social Media Influence 2012. Here’s the link to learn more about the event‘s impressive speaker list and how to register.

Over the past 12 months, social media has gone from an “add-on” to “business critical” for marketers in the UK. Social has opened up a huge opportunity for brands to engage directly with customers, and every marketer understands now that there are clear benefits to using social media for marketing. But, as online engagement platform provider EPiServer noted in a recent study, the vast majority of UK businesses still struggle to effectively measure their return on social media investment. Here then are five keys to increasing your social media ROI.

How fast is social media uptake happening among UK companies? Consider these statistics from a recent EPiServer survey polling 250 UK-based marketers: greater than 3 in four (77%) of marketers surveyed are running an online community, or plan to in the next 12 months. Over one-third (35%) of companies have been actively using social media channels to engage with the public. These findings suggest that the early adopters are well established, but best-practice is still a difficult code to crack within most organizations. How then do you ensure you are getting the right message to the right audience via the right social channel in the most cost and time efficient way?

Consider these five points all marketers should implement as they put together their next social media campaign:

1. Use a single tool to measure multiple, segmented social media platforms
There are many social media platforms out there, from the big players like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to newcomers like Google+, Pinterest and Quora. Unless you have unlimited budget and content at hand, you’ll need to segment your platforms to prioritise where to put your efforts in. You need to use different platforms for different things, and segment your content accordingly to achieve optimal results. Mix in three, four or five platforms and you’re talking about a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re managing each platform individually. That’s why it makes sense to use a single tool to manage all your campaigns.

2. Manage content effectively with smart CMS
Great social media campaigns rely on great content that’s personalised for the audience you want to reach, and the platform you want to reach them on. For effective ROI you need your content to work harder for you. Managing unstructured content is a massive issue for marketing teams and web managers, let alone repurposing it, deploying in different ways across different social media platforms and keeping control of who (access rights, anyone) can distribute which content in which platform. Save time and money by extending your existing CMS to cover the content you deploy to social media site. It will also help you respond quicker and be more relevant to your target audience.

3. Make best use of people and time for optimal results
It’s a misconception that social media is “free” marketing. The true costs involved are in the time spent developing, managing and repurposing content, and time spent monitoring conversations and engaging with various communities. This requires that you have a good understanding of how “socially” mature your organization is, both at a corporate level and also among individual employees too. Moving everyone up the social media maturity curve from monitoring and push, to reach and engagement, will help deliver better results, but will also pose new challenges.

4. Measure campaign performance across individual channels
One of the biggest challenges with using multiple social media platforms is measuring how your campaigns perform across them all. Even the most basic metrics will differ from platform to platform: likes and shares, mentions and retweets. Measuring all of this is incredibly difficult and time-consuming if you are doing it separately for each platform. Linking your social platform to your own site analytics in one place will help you deliver faster reporting and actionable insights to improve your campaign.

5. Find and use the tools best suited for your organization
Using one tool to manage your website and your activity on social media platforms is simpler, less expensive and more effective than trying to master and integrate many different ones. If you can extend your website CMS to cover third party social media platforms you will benefit from a single interface and give yourself more time on doing the valuable stuff: developing content, engaging with customers and generating leads.

For more on these five points, and other insights on how to better drive traffic and achieve an enhanced social media ROI, download EPiServer’s latest ebook on the subject here.

EPiServer is an advertising partner of SMI.

We’re on the tools beat again this morning. Last week we looked at a McKinsey survey of business executives who showed their growing fondness for social networking and, in particular, video sharing. Today, we look a bit deeper into the latter phenomenon to show just how companies are deploying video to position themselves. 

The study comes from the trade publication Chief Marketer (its findings were summarized in eMarketer), saying that while email and a visible social media presence are now standard digital marketing tools, a new category to emerge on radar screens this year is video. SMI readers probably won’t be surprised by this finding. After all, as we reported last month, the ad revenues around social+video combined now represents a £443 million market in the UK alone. These two are the fastest growing segments of digital.

Let’s take a closer look at how video is being deployed. Chief Marketer found that video is at least as popular as display and pay-per-clicks advertising, and now more popular than commissioning white papers. (Not good news for freelance scribes who cannot work a camera to save their lives).

Video is being used to both boost web presence (aka, SEO standing) and to deliver thought leadership, a point we derive from the number of “niche” firms that are investing in webinars.  Here’s the full findings in chart form:

The social engagement chops of luxury brands has become nothing to sniff at lately. We saw a few weeks ago where Burberry Group swept top honors in the FTSE 100 Social Media Index, landing the No. 1 brand on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The high-end fashion label may have set the bar high, but that’s only because there’s a lot at stake in this corner of online retail.

A new infographic from UK-based digital marketing specialists at Tamba outlines neatly the land-rush that’s happened in the luxury space and the opportunities the sector sees in social- and mobile commerce. Tablet shoppers, after all, have a relatively high discretionary income and liking Gucci’s Facebook page has become an aspirational gesture for millions.

Tamba gets these details (and more) into its “Luxury Brands Social Media Zeitgeist” infographic:

As you can see, Burberry is not alone. Dior and Gucci are quickly gaining on Burberry, each sporting over 7 million Facebook fans. And, in one of the factoids we particularly like, among shoppers who boast of their latest luxury purchase, 60% prefer to do so on Facebook. Ok, maybe there’s a little bit of the snob factor at work here.

There have been a number of studies that look at the social smarts of today’s most tech-savvy companies. For example, last month we took a look at the phenomenon of the great stall happening on the corporate side with blogging and the subsequent surge in Tweeting. This is only one side of the story, of course. A far more telling picture is to look at uptake of social tools. And we have that for you here.

The data comes from an annual McKinsey study which it published in November in the McKinsey Quarterly. They have pulled one of the more compelling pieces of data (a breakdown of social tools preferred by organizations) from that study and re-issued it this week. We missed it the first time ’round, but wanted to highlight it here today since they’ve been so kind as to alert us to it again.

Here it is in chart form:

There’s little surprise that social networks is the Number 1 tool, with 50% of respondents saying they currently use this “social tool” in the workplace. It’s 10% year-on-year growth rate is hardly a surprise either. But what is interesting to us is the growth in video-sharing. Its usage has grown by 5% within organizations in the past year and is gaining on – gulp – blogging as the second most favored social tool in use. What is most surprising is that less than one-quarter of respondents are micro-blogging. This too is going up, however. We’ll be interested to see what changes are in place for 2012 with the explosion in video upon us.

As customer-reviews specialist Yelp proved yesterday in its first quarterly earnings report, all big acquisitions in our lives will start with asking the crowd first what they think or know of a particular merchant or product. Here in lies the promise –  and challenge – for a social commerce sector that’s expected to top $30 billion in the next few years.

Drilling a bit deeper into the social customer equation is UK-based Gloople, a B2B social commerce specialist. It published this latest infographic entitled “The Future of the Social Customer,”  looking at the social customer, pulling together a series of data points and research that trace the path from browsing on, say, Facebook or Twitter to pulling out the credit card.

 

Editor’s Note: Join us on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012 for an in-depth discussion into the future of social commerce. We’ll be joined by an impressive lineup of speakers who have made a highly successful transition to social retail.

There are now more than 46 million avid “gadget” gamers in Western Europe, and Britain leads the league table by a surprising margin. Looked at another way, over 40% of Europe’s smartphone users are using their sleek new handsets for gaming, a phenomenon triggered by the success of Angry Birds, Farmerama and Draw Something. Gaming has now leap-frogged music as one of the most popular uses for smartphones.

According to comScore, mobile gaming adoption has grown 55% year-on-year. And the 46.4 million mobile gaming fans brings the market to a staggering 42% of all smartphone owners in the EU5 (as represented by the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy). Curious, we looked at past data in this area. For example, two years ago we saw where it was the French who led the mobile gaming market.

Here’s the country-by-country breakdown these days:

The social gaming growth trends are also growing impressively, this time with the Italians taking pole position. Here’s how comScore puts it:

In February 2012, 6.1 million EU5 smartphone gamers logged into a social game on their devices (up 42 percent in the past six months), representing 13.2 percent of smartphone gamers overall. The Italian smartphone gaming audience ranked first in terms of the penetration at 15.5 percent, followed by the UK (14.2 percent) and France (13.1 percent). Spanish smartphone users were most likely to play games with other people at 11.0 percent, followed by Italy at 9.4 percent.

And, finally, a breakdown of social gaming usage across Europe:

Editor’s Note: Join us on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012 for an in-depth discussion into the future of social gaming and mobile apps. We’ll be joined by an impressive lineup of speakers who have made a highly successful transition to the SO/MO/LO model.