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:

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.

The two biggest stories in digital right now are Facebook… and Facebook. On the eve of an IPO that could value Facebook at $100 billion we get word that automotive giant General Motors is pulling its $10 million Facebook ad budget on account of diminished returns. Is GM telling us something, that Facebook is a waste of money as a marketing opportunity? The answer: not so fast.

Firstly, we should get something clear. GM is not abandoning Facebook. It will keep its fanpages for GM and for its various brands such as Chevy Camaro and Cadillac alive. And, it will continue to invest in a social media team to keep them current, fresh and engaging. Community management doesn’t come cheap, marketers! It just won’t be paying Facebook (in the form of display ads) to drive extra traffic to these pages, nor off Facebook to its suite of brand or corporate sites.

To be sure, its decision to pull display ads from the world’s largest social network appears to be an indictment of Facebook as a marketing tool, but what it clearly is is a reassessment of its digital ad-buying priorities. GM might figure, heck, we’ve got 6 million-plus fans on our network of brand pages whom we can reach every day for free, why pay? After GM’s surprise move, you might be thinking the same thing. Let me explain then why it would be unwise to “pull a GM.”

1. Abandon a good thing at your peril.

Facebook is the world’s biggest ever media property with 901 million active users; 500 million of them log on daily to interact with their networks. That’s unprecedented potential reach and frequency. Plus, Facebook skews higher in all the relevant categories: its users are younger, wealthier and better educated. No wonder than that 89% of ad agencies in the U.S. plan to spend their social ad bucks with Facebook.

2. We’re only just beginning to see the true potential here.

A recent study showed that click-through rates for Facebook display ads were up 18% year-on-year in 2011. Not bad in an otherwise tough economic climate. Automotive isn’t the best-performing category, it should be noted, but it’s still in positive territory, as this study from TBG Digital shows.

Also to consider: the addition of Sponsored Stories and the new Facebook Timeline earlier this year are also boosting engagement rates and will do so for some time to come.

3. It’s where your competitors are…and where they are beating you.

As we’ve said recently, engagement is the new Holy Grail for digital marketers. Conversations beget conversions, which beget sales. No single sector is performing better in the fan engagement category than automotive. Why are the car-makers doing so well? The auto brands are good story-tellers. They produce some of the best creative, and their products hold immense interest for the public. Always have. (If only an FMCG marketer, pushing a brand of cleaning product or stock cooking cubes, had it so easy). But that’s not all. Auto brands do a better job of getting the consumer involved. Just think what Ford has done with the Focus, and, more recently, Chevrolet’s multi-channel effort around the Super Bowl this year.

One brand that is lagging here is General Motors. A quick glance of the auto leader board on Facebook, and you can see that GM and its brands land just four in the top 50, one of the worst performances of all auto brands. Who are the brands doing the best? The ones who can keep fans engaged with fresh content.

It should be noted, that not all of those in the Top 5 are prolific Facebook display-ad buyers. Certainly, Ferrari isn’t. It clearly gets by thanks to an avid fan base of drooling Ferrari fans.

But GM doesn’t have such a fan base. Never has. It needs to build excitement on Facebook (and elsewhere) for its models otherwise it will sink in to irrelevance.I predict it will be back on Facebook, perhaps as soon as next year’s auto shows.

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:

A comprehensive new study by Leo Burnett / Arc Worldwide aims to enlighten brands across the globe as to what their customers really want from their online shopping experience.

The report, ‘SocialShop’, contains the usual stats: 43 percent of Americans use social media to shop (that’s 95 million), and 73 percent of those confirmed they’re shopping socially more frequently than a year ago. Not mind-blowing stuff.

What is interesting however, is the depths to which the report examines social shopper needs, ultimately developing six shopper archetypes. By breaking down traits associated with indulgent needs, impulsive needs, utilitarian needs and informational needs, the researchers identified the following (from light social shoppers to heavy users):

Dollar Defaulter
This type of shopper has just one goal: to find the cheapest alternative, regardless of brand.

Efficient Sprinter
Shoppers considered ‘efficient sprinters’ will choose items based on their popularity and reviews, in order to simplify the shopping process.

Quality Devotee
These guys use social media to feel empowered in their purchases, using it to mould decisions and validate their choices, regardless of the time and effort involved, in order to find the best product available.

Strategic Saver
Strategic savers spend time ‘deal-digging’, to find their favourite brands at cheaper prices.

Opportunistic Adventurer
With impulsive shopping tendencies, these guys are all about scoring fun and unexpected deals, and are probably big fans of coupon sites.

Savvy Passionista
The heaviest social shopping user, Savvy Passionistas are indulgent and use social media to monitor trends, connect with brands and stay ‘in-the-know’.

Nick Jones, EVP, Head of Marketing for Leo Burnett / Arc Worldwide, says: “Our new study illuminates what brands need to do to reach shoppers in their own social worlds. Understanding how and why people are using social media to shop is the first and most important step to designing a successful social media program.”

Indeed, the report goes on to identify different shopping platforms, their relevance to each shopper type, and indicates positive methods of engaging each, all-in-all providing a valuable asset to brands and companies still unsure about the social shopping landscape. See it here.

The online press is filled with Pinterest success stories on a seemingly hourly basis. Retailers are using their pinboards to drive traffic, others are using it to drive higher revenues per click, marketers are using it to create buzz for their new launches and lastly publishers are seeing it drive eyeballs.Turns out though that while the Pinterest pioneers have shown us a vital new tool to build engagement, we’ve yet to see the best of what this platform can offer, says Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp.

Sharp, speaking at Digital Economy Forum in Venice, told today of how Pinterest, the scrapbook-style social network, is still very much a work in progress. For starters, there are no revenues. Sharp, a former architect, shrugs and says he’s not the business mind behind Pinterest. Instead, he’s more focused on designing the perfect platform. “But there are plenty of things we can do in the area of advertising or retailing that would make sense,” he offers.

Still, there are plenty of urgent matters to consider when it comes to that platform. Firstly, there’s the language problem. For a global phenomenon (though, admittedly, Pinterest is not so well known here in Italy as evidenced by the few hands raised at the start of Sharp’s presentation), it’s available only in English. That will change soon, says Sharp. The other big shortcomings: Pinterest’s lone app presence is on the iPhone. There is is nothing yet for Android, nor iPad. Pinterest hopes to address these shortcomings shortly, though he didn’t give specifics on a timetable. It had better come soon: Android owners, for one, are falling prey to scam Pinterest apps.

“We’re less focused on demographics, and more focused on the platform,” Sharp says to reinforce the company’s commitment to evolving Pinterest for mobile users. And, if you’re curious about that demographic, this is what it looks like. Yes, a lot of mommy bloggers and collectors of various objects.

Sharp was asked the question all marketers want to know: what’s the secret formula to ensuring your pinning drives traffic, eyeballs and sales? Sharp said he’s been impressed by the usage of Pinterest by museums, some of which have used Pinterest to pin select images of, say, a exhibition as a way to get the public to discover great pieces of art. An alluring front door, if you will. But, he says in all candor, we’ve yet to see the best there is to offer on Pinterest. Pinning that inspires others to start their own collections, for example, have enormous potential, he added.

The big take-away point comes from Sharp’s rather elegant way of summing up what Pinterest means to him, and, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, to its avid user base. Pinterest represents a sea change in how we create, share and connect. Whereas Facebook is a walled garden, Pinterest is a curated catalog, curated by creative people whom you trust.

Sharp’s belief in the power of curation is a powerful one. To him, it is curation = creation. Curation in the hands of everyone is the future, he believes.

So get out there and start pinning!

I was running a workshop earlier this week teaching a group of professionals how to “think like editors” and by doing so, start creating stories and content that have value and are useful to social media audiences.

It’s a course I’ve run many times and, as with anything you do a lot, it’s easy to become a bit complacent. So, when it came to the part of the workshop where I try to demystify the new buzzword platforms and networks that are springing up, I felt pretty calm answering everyone’s questions until someone asked: “So I’ve been hearing a lot about Pinterest. That’s just about images, right?”

“Oh, yes, just images,” I said with the confidence of a man who had spent the previous evening engaged in some hardcore “pinning”.

Wrong. It turns out this hottest of hot new social networks has been offering video pinning since last August.

Why this self-indulgent minor mea culpa? Well, part of my job is to keep on top of the latest social technologies, platforms and apps. So if I’m making such a social media geek schoolboy error about a network as influential as Pinterest, how can more “normal” folk hope to navigate the increasingly Byzantine social tech landscape, never mind use them effectively for sustainability communications?

In the past six months Pinterest has skyrocketed in terms of users and popularity, while mobile photo app Instagram was snapped by Facebook for a cool $1bn (£618m). Yet, away from the headlines, dozens of other smart, creative apps and platforms – startups such as Present.me and Spreecast along with not quite startups such as Slideshare and Storify to name a few – are creating new opportunities for collaborative, authentic and transparent storytelling – the bread and butter of sustainability comms.

At the same time, a host of once adventurous and much loved social media platforms – ventures such as Flickr, Delicious, Gowalla (which was shut down in March) and Ning to name a few – have waned in popularity, been subsumed by other companies or simply crashed and burned.

In this disruptive media landscape it would be very easy to bury your head in the sand, wait until everything settles down and some new social media king of the jungle emerges. Except that isn’t going to happen. So, given that you can’t depend on your online community coming to visit your corporate website (seriously). And given that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in that Facebook basket (seriously), where should sustainability communicators be looking establish a social media voice?

Some of the biggest and most successful social media brands advocate being wherever their customers are. That’s understandable if you’re a major consumer brand such as Ford or Pepsico who have established social media satellites on many different platforms and networks. But does that approach necessarily make sense if you’re selling laundry detergent, banking or energy services?

One way of determining where your social media voice should be is first to work out what you have to say and how it can be of value, useful even, to the social media communities you want to connect to.

Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Tumbler, even Facebook have trendy techie names. Fundamentally though, they are just publishing platforms, albeit ones that specialise in video, words and images and are either more broadcast or conversational depending on the platform. Once you know the story you want to tell and understand the interests of the platform community, then you can start fine tuning and packaging that story to work across relevant social media.

That’s why Whole Foods chose to highlight the work of its Whole Planet Foundation on Pinterest and why UPS chose to created a dedicated (and “likeable”) sustainability page on Facebook. It’s also why the likes of Suncor, Iberdrola and even the IFC and GRI are using professional document and presentation sharing sites such as Issuu, Slideshare and Scribd to reach their target sustainability communities.

The more sustainability professionals use social media outside of work, the more likely they’ll be to experiment with social channels and platforms for sustainability communications. But choosing the hottest new channel or biggest network is no guarantee of social media success. Understanding how sustainability stories might be of value to different and particular social media communities is a much better place to start.

This column first ran in the The Guardian.

Goldman Sachs needs you. Well, one of you at least. The Wall Street juggernaut, the investment bank everyone loves to hate, is searching for a social media engagement specialist, we learned this week. To be sure, it’s a recruitment first for Goldman, which has seen public opinion around its brand hit new lows in recent months.

Much of it, as we’ve detailed in the past, is due to its complete ignorance for and neglect of social media. Case in point, Goldman has a Twitter channel it’s never used and a Facebook fan page that’s long been overrun by haters. No wonder it found itself completely incapable of adequately defending itself, despite its well-paid PR team, when a manager quit in March and penned the now infamously viral “Why I left Goldman Sachs” resignation letter.

When it comes to social smarts – by which, we mean transparency, responsiveness, accountability; all of the traits that the public values and will reward in the brands of the future – Goldman is a bunch of “muppets,” to use the favorite lingo of GS traders. So, it’s no stretch to say this new recruitment effort, started by former press secretary to President Bill Clinton – Richard L. “Jake” Siewert Jr., Goldman’s new head of global communications – may be the most important hire the company has made in decades.

We’re following their Twitter feed for word, any update really. But we’re not holding our breath. As of the time of this writing, the Tweet count sat at zero.

Turning now from the least social savvy of companies to the real innovators now… Just a reminder that registration is open and the agenda is set for this year’s Social Media Influence 2012 conference in June. We’ll be again focusing squarely on best-practice social/mobile/digital strategy in the business world. You’ll hear from the companies, brands and organizations that are innovating in the area of social gaming, social commerce, social media marketing and social business design. You’ll hear how companies have increased sales, amplified their message and harnessed better ideas from within their organizations using the latest digital and social media tools and strategies. If you register by May 15th, you’ll get a free copy of our e-book: #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups and How to Avoid Being the Next One.

Come join us on June 12th!

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

Follow us on Twitter at: @socialinfluence… And on Facebook.

Photo credit.

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.