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.

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.

2012 is fast living up to its billing of being the year of Big Data. Investors are in an expectant froth about the imminent Facebook IPO, an estimated $100bn flotation built on harvesting the personal likes of 900 million members (according to its newest financial figures). There’s the smaller but equally eye-popping $3.2bn (32 times earnings) valuation of a Big Data analytics firm, Splunk. And there’s what might be considered the curious acquisition by Walmart of the popular Facebook app start-up, Social Calendar. Curious that is until you start imagining what a retailer the size of Walmart could do with all that data about your best friend’s birthday, your wedding anniversary or your summer holiday plans.

Even as we continue to share extraordinary amounts of formerly private (or at least almost inaccessible) information in our Faustian bargain for better, more useful social media experiences, a privacy backlash is growing. Just last week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, warned of the dangers in putting so much personal data in the hands of just a few social networking companies, and urged Netizens to demand access to their personal data from the likes of Facebook and Google.

Of course, excitement and fear about data mining have been competing since the birth of the web. I remember a company all-hands meeting back in 2000 when my then publisher spoke excitedly about how online customer relationship management (CRM) would transform the media business and our publication in particular. (The dot-com crash put paid to the second part of that prediction.) Fast-forward 12 years and the new online analytics boom business is social-CRM – mining social network conversations, likes and follows to intuit and predict customer behaviour.

The reason for the new boom is the explosion in online data being created and shared. According to the technology research firm, IDC, data is growing at 50% a year. One recent report from the World Economic Forum, Big Data, Big Impact, boldly classed data a new economic asset, like currency or gold. As new social technologies and platforms come online, and as the Internet of Things begins to mature these streams of data will explode, and the companies that mine them will likely have even more power over our lives than ever before.

But, hold on a second. Does the Big Data revolution have to scripted like an out-take from Minority Report? Even as companies fine-tune their Big Data targeting in order to sell us more stuff in locations and at times when we least expect it, a growing movement of data scientists are asking the question: how can we use Big Data for social good?

This is the focus of Jake Porway, the founder of Data Without Borders (just renamed Datakind). A data scientist at the New York Times by day, Porway has lit a fire under the data analytics community by mobilising a small army of volunteer data geeks to help crunch solutions for social projects. In one example, Data Without Borders helped the New York Civil Liberties Union understand whether the New York Police Department was guilty of racial profiling (and whether they were working to meet arrest quotas) by analysing and mapping the publicly available arrest logs of NYPD beat officers. Its next collaborative goal is helping Chicago non-profit organisations unlock some of their Big Data answers.

What Porway is enabling in the US, Ushahidi, a crisis-mapping outfit has been pioneering globally since 2008. Ushahidi (testimony in Swahili) started mapping reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout that year. Since then its team of data mappers have created platforms for tracking and crowdsourcing texts, emails along with social media updates from blogs and Twitter that have helped in countless crises, including the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Japan tsunami as well as Libya’s revolution.

The potential for using smart data and social technologies to drive sustainability is also taking root in academia. Smart data thinkers from MIT, Northeastern University, Harvard and the Santa Fe Institute are working on a collaborative project, ESS (short for Engineering Social Systems). Some of the research projects it is considering include using Big Data modelling to predict food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa and using techniques such as expectation-maximisation to create economic systems that enable people to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones. Now imagine the business opportunities for forward-thinking telcos, mobile players and agricultural/food producers that focused their efforts on these types of sustainability projects?
Some of the biggest technology and engineering companies are starting to do just that. Current data-mapping projects in Rio de Janeiro by IBM – part of its Smarter Cities initiative – along with other urban partnership schemes run by Siemens and Philips (I’ll be writing in more detail about social tech in sustainable cities in a different column) all point to a small but important emerging corporate trend of analysing Big Data not just to mainline sales channels but to navigate a path to more sustainable living and business.

According to the New York Times, as the Big Data economy continues to grow, the US needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers. Let’s hope a good chunk of that expertise can be employed towards harnessing Big Data for sustainability. As Porway said in a speech at a recent Poptech conference, “What if we started using data, not just to ask what type of movie we wanted but to see but what type of world we want to see?”

Now that’s “Social” CRM we could all embrace.

This post first appeared as part of Matthew Yeomans’s The Social Business column in Guardian Sustainable Business.

Last month we looked at a promising study that demonstrated how social-savvy businesses were seeing “four times greater business impact” than their less socially engaged peers. That finding masked one not-so-rosy issue that continues to hold back further take-up and investment in social: the difficulty of measuring its ROI. A new piece of research drills down into the UK and finds companies having increasing difficulty calibrating just how far their social investment is going.The latest piece of research on this matter out this week from EPiServer says just one in ten UK businesses is able to confidently measure the return on its social media investment with any level of accuracy. Worse still, marketers are finding that they need to spend more of their time managing (and measuring) social media.

Here are the key figures of the survey, which was conducted with 250 UK-based marketing specialists:

• 90% of UK businesses failing to effectively measure social media ROI
• Over half of UK companies have increased the amount of time dedicated to managing social media this year, with 20% expecting it to increase further in the next twelve months
• 17% reported intent to set up more social media channels in the coming year

So, you can see it’s a mixed picture. The enthusiasm for social hasn’t waned. If anything, with the rise of Google+ and Pinterest in the past year, the level of commitment to multi-channel social media marketing and communications remain strong. While you’d expect time commitment would ratchet up alongside this phenomenon, you’d imagine that already time-strapped managers may be putting off the full investment until they are properly staffed.

Despite the Twitter population giving a general thumbs down to sponsored and promoted tweets with claims that they’re too intrusive, Facebook is following a similar suit with its new Offers feature.

Currently in a beta version, Offers lets small businesses send promotions directly to the news feeds of their fans, who can click the Get Offer link to have coupons sent to their email or cell phone. Facebookers are unable to opt out of viewing offers, which has sparked some concerns over cluttered-looking news feeds, and of course, intrusiveness, especially as the Offers will be made to look like regular posts. (Indeed, some critics have already slammed the feature as ‘part of a broader strategy to make ads look less conspicuous’). This is turn will create a new dynamic for brands to be aware of, too; without any way to opt out of viewing the ads, posting too many or too frequently could result in users simply un-liking their pages, resulting in a diminished social audience.

Facebook Offers is an overt nod towards the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial, but launched just eight months after canning its Deals feature, will the new venture prove more successful? Especially as many regarded the death of Deals as a sign that consumers were growing weary of constant bombardment with specials and promotions?

According to Entrepreneur:

“Unlike Facebook Check-In Deals, Facebook Offers doesn’t require users to check-in to a merchant’s physical location in order to take advantage of an offer. That’s likely to make Offers appealing to consumers who are wary of their Facebook Friends knowing where they are and what they’re buying.”

Well actually, after claiming an offer a story about it will automatically be added to users’ timelines, unless they change their privacy settings beforehand, so their social circles will still see what they’re purchasing. Of course, this is the inherently social aspect of Facebook, so users already concerned about this will likely have their privacy settings under control anyway.

But, as rightly observed, Offers requires no action. No checking-in, no opting-in, the deals are right there, forcing themselves upon the eyes of the user. As PC World’s Ed Oswald notes: “Up until now, the news feed had been the last bastion of ad-free bliss on the social networking site. That is now gone.” It will be interesting to see how Offers are received by users, and the knock-on effect on the businesses using them. Will it prove the kiss of life, or the kiss of death, for f-commerce?

As predicted, Pinterest has proved itself a formidable presence in the f-commerce arena following figures showing it’s the fastest growing social media traffic source for e-commerce websites in terms of revenue.

Jeffrey Zwelling, Head of marketing performance tracking company Converto, revealed on VentureBeat that “Pinterest is the clear winner” when it comes to ‘first touch’ revenue per click (measured by tracking referral traffic from different sources to see what resulted in revenue), generating over four times as much revenue per click as Twitter and 27 percent more revenue per click than Facebook.

On a ‘multi-touch basis’ (where credit is given to every marketing channel regardless of its position in the purchasing chain) Pinterest still takes the lead, with Converto’s figures showing that it generates $0.45 per click compared to $0.40 for Facebook and $0.23 for Twitter.

Furthermore, in Q2 2011 Pinterest.com represented 1.2 percent of social media revenue for e-commerce sites. That figure now stands are 17.4 percent and Converto predicts the social pinning-sphere will be responsible for 40 percent of social media transactions by the end of Q2 2012, reducing mighty Facebook’s share to under 60 percent, down from 86 percent last year.

Zwelling encourages e-commerce sites to accelerate their Pinterest revenue by adding the ‘Pinit’ button to each catalog SKU on their websites – a simple and effective feature to drive traffic and sales. Credit where credit due: Pinterest has stampeded into the market and given Facebook a very loud and intrusive wake up call indeed.

Editor’s Note: Come here some of the top thinkers and practitioners in the area of social commerce speak about what’s driving sales for their firms and what new innovations will drive the market tomorrow at Social Media Influence 2012 in June.

A few weeks ago we wrote about the “mission-critical” importance of Tweeting business leaders. Why is that? Put simply, CEOs who communicate freely using social media are held in higher regard – not just by employees, but by customers too, study after study shows. An organization where the boss Tweets is an organization where internal communications is more dynamic and transparent. That then has an impact on external comms, or the brand image portrayed to the public.

Let’s head to another end of the organization now, to the developers, engineers and coders where some of the best ideas and brightest innovations are emerging in the business world, as evidenced by the run-away success of Instagram. I’ve professed my fandom for Instagram in this column before. In under 18 months, it has amassed a user base of 35 million people who swap photos on the go. What’s almost as impressive is the number of employees at Instagram: 13.

No wonder Facebook this week acquired it on the cheap for a cool $1 billion. Why cheap? That’s about $30-a-user acquisition price, historically low by tech M&A standards. And these aren’t just any old users. They are younger, more mobile and more tech savvy than Facebook’s core audience (though there’s plenty of overlap, to be sure). In short, these are the kinds of customers that the companies of the future will be courting. Yes, they are demanding, but they are generally more loyal and just meeting the demands of their usage patterns creates a built-in innovation loop in any organization.

This then brings us to the importance of coders, designers and engineers who have the room and buy-in to innovate. Given the opportunity they will be developing tomorrow’s Instagram and the new markets that go along with it. This is the formula for successful innovation in today’s business world. We’re reminded of it by 13 newly minted mega-millionaires. A powerful message.

Speaking of powerful messages… We have you covered on the topic of the big innovations that will transform the business world this year and next. Where? At Social Media Influence 2012, our annual conference in June. Dynamic leaders from GE, Unilever, Microsoft, Google, London 2012, Conde Nast and many more will take you through the big innovations and trends that are transforming the business world today and will help you cash in tomorrow. Come join us!

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

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

If you’re like most of us, you cannot keep track of the varied username/password protocols required to log back into a particular website. Is it the four-digit password or the eight-, you wonder? Is it the alpha-numeric version? Are symbols required? Right. I forget. Send me the change password details to my in-box and I’ll start over. And so the cycle repeats itself again and again. It’s not surprising then that a new piece of research tells us consumers want to do away with this game of guess-the-password in favor of social logins.

What’s a social login, exactly? It’s the ability to log into a website using a preferred social network identity, i.e., logging into a branded site using your Facebook or Twitter log-in. According to Portland, Ore-based Janrain, 85% of UK consumers advocating that social media login should be offered by all websites. It’s not surprising that Janrain finds the number to be so high. It’s in the business of giving companies user management solutions for the social web, one of which is fitting branded sites with social logins.

On occasion of Janrain’s new move to London, the seat of its European operation, Russell Loarridge, European Sales Director at Janrain, explains, “there is a very rapid shift taking place in the b2c market, which brands must act on now. Most consumers are now so comfortable with social media and the concept of sharing personal detail in the public domain, that they are starting to expect brands marketing and sales activities to be able to offer a more personalised experience.”

Janrain says that the gap between consumer wants and website response is still far apart. “With 85% of UK consumers advocating that social media login should be offered by websites and indeed over 50% having already come across and used  social login, it is becoming clear that companies who are not engaging with their audience in this way will lose favour and custom very rapidly to competitors who are offering a more ‘social’ experience,” Loarridge says.

We’ve taken up this question a few times now here at SMI: should the boss be Tweeting? And the answer always comes with the phrase “it depends…” as in, it depends, is the CEO a sociopath? or, it depends, is the CEO a fictional figure? If you check these boxes, it’s best to keep the boss far away from Twitter or any social media channel. But here’s fresh evidence that should serve as added incentive for organizations to groom the next boss from the ranks of lucid Tweeters.

According to a new survey by BRANDfog, CEOs who communicate freely using social media are held in higher regard – not just by employees, but by customers too. The idea being that the boss who Tweets leads to an organization where internal communications is more dynamic and transparent. That then has an impact on external comms, or the brand image portrayed to the public. The findings were picked up by eMarketer, which writes:

In terms of importance, 86% of respondents rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical. CEO activity on social networks also appears to influence employees’ faith in their company. The study findings indicate that 82% of employee respondents trust a company more when the CEO and leadership team communicate via social media.

Here’s the trust equation spelled out in chart form, again thanks to eMarketer.

The findings here jibe nicely with another piece of research we wrote about yesterday discussing the critical buy-in required at the C-Suite level. Here’s what we reported:

Two-thirds of the organizations [surveyed] achieving the highest returns [on social media engagement] reported that their C-suites are active advocates– that is, they commit to social engagement as a strategy and they reallocate resources to make it happen.

But there’s a big BUT here too…

However, a full 28% of C-suite executives still don’t believe in social engagement. And the number one reason? The inability to gauge ROI (45%). For engagement to work, the C-suite has to believe in it and see measurable returns.

The lesson: it starts from the top. If the CEO isn’t participating, it’s unlikely he or she doesn’t see the value in a socially engaged company. Such dinosaur executive thinking though is likely to cost him job when the inevitable crisis hits that he didn’t see coming.

We saw earlier this month some of the clearest signs yet that marketers have shed their reservations for investing in social media, committing to upping the spend in the coming year. Now, a new study shows that the most social-savvy companies are using social engagement to expand marketshare, generate more sales leads and more efficiently hone their marketing message.

The study, conducted by Austin-based PulsePoint Group and The Economist Intelligence Unit, says companies that fully embrace social engagement are seeing “four times greater business impact” than their less socially engaged peers. How exactly was that measured? PulsePoint looked at the effect of those companies who actively engage with employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders “in meaningful conversations – enabled by social technologies – so that both parties benefit.  This mutual exchange of value is not just about products but about useful information that builds commonality of interests and a sense of trust.”

Here’s the key findings:

• The average return on social engagement was calculated to be between 3-5%. The most engaged businesses are reporting a calculated 7.7% business impact specifically from social engagement, which is four times the performance of the lowest performers who only achieved a 1.9% estimated return.

• The top two areas where executives thought social engagement had real value were  improved marketing and sales effectiveness (84%) and increased sales and market share (81%).

• C-suite advocacy is critical, now and in the future. Two-thirds of the organizations  achieving the highest returns reported that their C-suites are active advocates– that is, they commit to social engagement as a strategy and they reallocate resources to make it happen.

• However, a full 28% of C-suite executives still don’t believe in social engagement. And the number one reason? The inability to gauge ROI (45%). For engagement to work, the C-suite has to believe in it and see measurable returns.

• The most socially engaged segments believe that widely distributed buy-in across the organization – and beyond marketing and communications – is key for scale and generating economic business impact. This even includes operations management and financial leadership.

• Executives defined social engagement today as online listening (28%), blogging (24%) and building relationships with online influencers (21%).  But the top performers have a different view – they will be more focused on ideas and action in the next two years. Big-return companies crowdsource new products (57%), or let customers participate in developing ideas — they are predicting a significant portion of new products will be derived from social engagement insights.

• Fifty-nine percent of executives/managers interviewed say that young people, as employees and customers, will expect and value engagement; that’s what is driving their engagement plans. Fifty-four percent say that customers’ expectations of social engagement is driving their plans.

• In order for companies to know whether their investments are providing returns, appropriate metrics need to be developed.  The research indicates that benchmarks (33%) and key performance indicators (30%) will be the top approaches for measuring social engagement in the next two years.  Today, many companies are depending on executive intuition (27%) or are simply not measuring impact (28%).

PulsePoint says it will host webinar on Thursday, April 19 at 1 p.m. EDT to discuss the findings in more detail. You can register here.

Editor’s Note: Come here some of the top thinkers and practitioners in the area of social commerce speak about what’s driving sales for their firms and what new innovations will drive the market tomorrow at Social Media Influence 2012 in June.