Australian brand sites losing to the Social Web

There's an interesting article published on digitalbuzz contending that the focus on driving customers to a brand site is no longer effective. We have run the same analysis on the Australian market and the trends appear to be quite consistent: 50% declines in daily unique visits over the past 2 years (while search volumes for key terms in those categories remained the same or even increased).

Why the decline?

The DigitalBuzz article contends that;

We are hanging out in social sites where relevant content finds us through our friends rather than searching out brands
Content is being pushed off-site through mechanisms such as RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels and Facebook Fan pages

It's the second part that I'm interested in exploring but first some pretty graphs ...

Car Makers

Electronics

Computers

Media

Okay - it all looks like we're losing interest in the interwebs - but wait, all that attention is going somewhere ...

Facebook & Twitter

Clearly facebook is the huge winner in terms of daily engagement although we may see twitter has made a good start and my overtake MySpace in the next 12 months!

What's a brand to do?

I think the opportunity is for brands to start thinking of themselves as publishers - of useful information for their customers. This means going beyond describing the product to telling stories about how it might impact someone's life. If this content is modular and shareable, it will find its way to social spaces where relevant conversations can happen around it. These conversations are where trust is built and people move closer to a purchase decision.

Rather than pushing out campaign centric content on your timeline, it's now important to be there (wherever your customers are) when they are in the buying cycle.

Recommendations

Create customer centred content that is modular and has good metadata (descriptions)
Give permission (and guidelines) for people to take it to other online spaces
Attach a way to find you (for purchase or more info)
Put metrics on the important bits and pay attention to what's working
Monitor conversations and participate when appropriate

Example

Here's an an entry on Adam Brand's (he's a client) web site ...

And here it is on his Facebook fan page where it gets a lot more interaction and social proof ...

So what do you think?

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Posted by Ian Lyons

Oct 06, 2009

OtherAndrew said...

Great work Ian, this certainly presents a compelling case for brands to start taking social media seriously.

Thanks for the post.

Oct 07, 2009

Weed Connection said...

interesting article. check out our site. we are kinda doing what you are talking about, publishing useful infotainment.

P. said...

great article

Arthur Alston said...

mmm - thought provoking, makes sense intuitively (if I think about my own behaviour)

tomkelshaw said...

Google trends is an excellent way of demonstrating this phenomenon, nice work. We're currently addressing this shift with a major FMCG digital strategy, ensuring most if not all of our "brand content" is available and shareable in the social media space.

"Fish where the fish are", right?

datalicious said...

Nice work... So what about all the online marketing managers that have to increase website UVs as a KPI? Fighting up-hill battle.

Interested to see the different models for measuring the new online landscape effectively. I really hope that in 2010, every online marketing manager has social media metrics (the right ones) as part of their KPIs and isn't expected to increase traffic... Even Apple hasn't been able to do this.

As an aside, what happened to Ninemsn this year? ouch!

Sarah DeAtley said...

I completely agree with what you're recommending here. Maybe showing this to certain managers could help me make my case for this strategy!

Simon T Small said...

Hey Ian, I'm do digital strategy for Holden, so have insight into the site's performance and have also been developing an SM strategy.

Three main things come to mind after reading your post:
1. The data in the Google trends report is no even close to accurate both in volume and trend
2. Social media activity is definitely increasing, however, we're finding that as that increases it results in more traffic to the brand website
3. I totally agree with your recommendations

And...

What we're observing for our clients in social spaces is that often (not always) the conversation is from people who are not in market or near in market to buy, so the engagement that we're creating wont directly result in immediate sales. It creates loyalty and advocates, which then recommend our product and are more likely to purchase.

So considering that the traffic to our sites is not decreasing, and the conversations in social spaces are not always influencing product purchase there's no need for alarm. More so there's need for optimism and grabbing a new opportunity.

Ian Lyons said...

Hi Simon,

Thanks so much for chiming in.

1. I'm always cautious about stats but have previously cross checked google against known data and found it to be the most accurate 3rd party measure that is easily accessible. I don't suppose Holden would allow you to share an accurate graph for the same period? :)

2. I was tempted to write about how decreasing total traffic actually doesn't matter - if the remaining traffic represents high quality leads and your total profit goes up. In the interest of brevity however, I left this conversation to the comments section. Brand sites are still absolutely crucial as the "official" place to get information and transact. There's also a big opportunity to recognise when traffic comes from a social space and tailor the experience accordingly.

3. Another way of putting my recommendation is to not build a flashterbation site - which precludes sharing in social spaces.

Your last point is crucial and I find often ignored online in the pursuit of short term, direct response results. In the "real world", businesses understand about building relationships, understanding and desire over time. This beautiful Porsche ad illustrates the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRbzJ0L1Zn8

I think this is often ignored online because the decision makers don't fully understand how the process works. It is therefore our job to draw the parallels to a process they do understand.

-Ian

I'd like to propose a new performance metric acronym to replace UVs. I call it PCs - Profitable Customers.

Oct 08, 2009

Love the idea of PCs, or maybe PVs, profitable visitors, or maybe VVs valuable visitors.

Love the Porchse example, long term relationships do still happen.

Jim Stewart said...

As opposed to TCs - the Tyre Clickers

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