This is an interesting new integration, something one would have expected to happend between one of the big search engines and Facebook but Omniture clearly stole them the show on this one, nice one Omniture! 

Omniture and Facebook announced that they will provide online marketers with solutions to optimize Facebook as a marketing channel. This partnership builds on the Facebook analytics and Facebook application analytics capabilities Omniture announced last year.

As the industry moves beyond marketing that 'interrupts' the consumer's online experience, companies are increasingly seeking ways to join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers. This alliance can help companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in order to connect to and have relevant conversations with Facebook's more than 400 million active users.

Omniture customers can now utilize Omniture SearchCenter Plus, which is the combination of the company's search engine marketing management application with new functionality for purchasing Facebook Ads. Omniture customers can now more easily ramp their ad spend on Facebook and compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels.

Marketers see the opportunity to build and reward customer loyalty on Facebook. To help in these efforts, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Contact Chris at cbartens@datalicious.com if you would like to find out more or enable this integration for your company.

Read the full story here on MarketWatch 
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/omniture-and-facebook-join-forces-to-optimize-social-media-for-marketers-2010-03-03

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According to Edelman's TweetLevel service that just launched Datalicious's influence score is 32.1. Another metric for our social media toolbox that we'll be tracking going forward.

http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/

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According to the report email gained in popularity for marketing messages but Internet users reported using it less for their own written communications, the biggest increase here happened in social networks.

Read the original article here or download the full report from ExactTarget
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007330
http://pages.exacttarget.com/channel_bundle_home

   

Click here to download:

Forrester_ExactTarget_report_o.zip (20 KB)

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Great research from Jakob Nielsen on how business users interact with social networks, I especially like the part on 'overly frequent postings' which really annoy me (and I hope we're not in the same category).

Summary: Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

Some key insights form the article

• Users prefer casual style for business messages on social networks
• RSS feeds are seen as more trustworthy
• RSS feeds are checked at work, social networks from home
• Only 6% of users accessed corporate social networks from mobiles
• People like a single stream of news that pushes old stuff down
• Users are unlikely to search for old messages or scroll down
• Posting frequency and expectations are tied to the service
• If you post too rarely, your material will drift out of users' time-streams
• If you post too much, you'll crowd out other messages
• Three great motivators are fear, greed (deals), exclusivity (latest news)
• Sites that are not updated regularly give a bad impression
• Users don't actively seek out companies in social networks
• There's usually another trigger such as recommendations (re-tweets!)
• Overall message usefulness still scores low but trustworthiness high
• Useful messages have substance, are timely, provided expected info
• Trustworthiness is influenced by clear user names and logos
• The shorter the message, the more important the writing

Read the original article here
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/streams-feeds.html

Or buy the research report here (and email me a copy please)
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/streams/

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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;

1. We are hanging out in social sites where relevant content finds us through our friends rather than searching out brands
2. 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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There's a new social media search and analytics engine out there called http://www.socialmention.com/ which not only scans the social and consumer generated content sphere out there for any search term you put in but also gives you a sentiment analysis, i.e. whether people are talking about the specified keyword in a positive, neutral or negative way. Very useful for brand strength and perception analysis if combined with http://www.google.com/trends charts on brand search term volume in general.

We love the new service and think it's awesome but would love some more info on how the sentiment analysis is done as the outcome sometimes seems questionable, i.e. Barack Obama negative 27 vs. Osama Bin Laden negative 11). Also, a comparison and charting functionality would be great so we could compare a few different search terms next to each other over time.

SocialMention.com: Barack Obama
http://socialmention.com/search?q=barack+obama&t=blogs&btnG=Search

SocialMention.com: Osama Bin Laden
http://socialmention.com/search?q=osama+bin+laden&t=blogs&btnG=Search

   

Click here to download:

SocialMention.com_Barack_Obama.zip (552 KB)

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