Social Media Training - do you really need it?

It's almost shocking to see the number of "introduction to Social Media" courses still being touted about. A quick search on Google highlights just how seriously the suppliers of Social Media Training are right now:

And a quick look at the term "Social Media Training" in Google Trends shows that the term is predicted to grow in the number of searches over the next year, albeit less so than when it first appeared on Google's radar back at the beginning of 2009.

So given all this supply and searching for the term, just who are the intended recipients?
I'm sure I can't be the only person who must assume that anyone who wants to understand the fundamentals of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube must have got to grips with the basics of each by now?

Building your corporate digital analytics capability

As an organisation develops its digital understanding, you see certain trends and processes emerging. One of those is the increasing usage of digital analytics and increasing business reliance on the figures produced.

Digital analytics is now taken seriously as a business tool. From what was once a mainly geek-ish domain has emerged a significant service that can empower the business to make more rational or efficient decisions.  But just as other digital resources have grown (and grown-up) over time, the analytics resource in your organisation may well have grown too. If fact, making the point a bit stronger, if your web analytics team has not grown in size or depth in their understanding as the rest of your online capability has matured, you are probably missing something.

However… creating, scaling and keeping your web insight team is not an easy task.
Firstly positioning the team as just another marketing service is not the right approach. Having them regarded in the same light as a search engine optimisation or pay-per-click resource misses the point. This is not to take anything away from the SEO or PPC staff you might employ but the online analytics function is not just there to inform and maintain the current activity… but can also be used to feed insight back into your organisation too.

Creating the right online customer analysis and insight team structure depends a lot on the size & scale of your company. Most small companies do not have someone dedicated to this role (unless they are a digitally-focused business such as an eCommerce site) and even a lot of bigger companies combine the work of a web analytics function with other disciplines, and in a lot of cases this is digital marketing. It is therefore typically only much larger enterprises that can usually afford or utilise a dedicated person or persons in a digital analysis capacity.

Structuring this multi-person team can then be a little different from the way you might structure another digital functions. Although a lot depends on the types and quality of the individuals you hire. Just having a bunch of people who can all do the same things might not provide enough specialisation or focus… and analytics can quickly get into specifics. Some larger teams can range in skill-sets from more technical-orientated people through to business-based modellers who can pull trends and opportunities from complex data structures.

Keeping the team (aside from the effects of your own management style) can be the hardest thing to achieve. From my own experience there is currently a lack of decent experience digital analytics professionals out in the market right now. Quite frankly, we need more digital analytics experts. People with the right skills and experience are given far more choice about who and where they work, with many choosing a more lucrative career as a freelancer or consultant. Therefore holding on to good digital insight staff is crucial if your organisation is to you want to grow your capability and retain best practice knowledge.

Nobody sets out to read ‘content’ online

It seems that everyone is panning for virtual gold in the Content Marketing sector like it's San Francisco in the 1850's. Taking a look at Google Trends for Search, the term "Content Marketing" is currently reaching a feverish peak... somewhat helped perhaps by Google recently clamping down on paid-for advertorial links

It seems that content is having a bit of a Renaissance right now (deservedly so) and the pendulum has swung back away from "design first, content later" to "content first, design later".

But here's my revelation... Most normal people when they use the web don't start by thinking "My, I must consume some content", instead they want to:

• Read opinions
• Gain insight
• Chuckle at rants
• Understand products
• Learn from ‘how to’ guides
• Take a peek at useful information
• Compare reviews
• Watch news
• Hear another person tell stories
• plus many other combinations of the above and more.

So prior to setting out to "do some content marketing" and before considering: search engines, your 'tone of voice guidelines', the design of the page and even your boss or client's feedback... Think about the most important person. Your reader.

US to see continued growth in online commerce

Today's post from eMarketer shows a slow but healthy grown in the both the number of online users (penetration) and the percentage that will purchase goods or services.


So whilst over 7 out of 10 of American internet users are now utilising eCommerce sites to make their purchases, this ratio is continuing to increase over at least the next 4 years.

This means that almost 30 million extra US consumers will transact online. Which can only be good news for the country's precarious economy right now.

Also, with half of American retailers planning to sell overseas in the next one to two years, UK retailers now need to look to protect their market share and also develop their international online sales ability.

Why isn't your annual report in HTML?

There's a growing trend over the last few years to put company annual report online. However, just sticking the print version on your website as a PDF (Portable Document Format) docuemnt just doesn't cut the mustard any more. In fact, in this recent research from Nexxar, in the UK two thirds of our top companies now produce their annual reports in HTML format.

Now I've previously covered the topic Company Report -The Next Generation, and in last year's posting I explained the benefits of delivering your Annual Report in HTML format. However what surprised me most about the finding's of Nexxar's research, was not that there are still a lot of companies holding onto their old formats, but that a number of the top French companies in the CAC40 have actually stopped producing HTML reports (and seemingly gone back to PDF or image-based reports in JPG format).

Have I missed something here and there's a reason for this? Or has the overall business climate contributed to a completed backwards step in how annual reports are now delivered online?

Peer 2 Peer pressure

I must be getting older, as I now firmly regard myself as a different generation from the teens and twenty-somethings.

So, as I try to make sense of what a connected world fully means to companies and brands... I do try to understand the impact an always-informed and life-streaming culture has on people, but especially those who embrace technology & communications the most, the Millennials.

I guess, as well as building services for monitoring brand sentiment via Twitter we need to build algorithms that detect cyber-bullying via Facebook' and other such useful tools that were previously not needed or even thought of.

It then begs the question about the types of challenges and pressures that a 24/7 connection creates.

The future may be bright, but it also brings with it new issues we have yet to understand, let alone solve!

Politicalist

I'm a great fan of the TV Programme 'The Mentalist' where an advisor to the police uses his uncanny ability to read situations and people to understand the situation and solve crimes.

With the General Election only a few months away, we here at Ideal Interface have been busy developing a tool to read the political online situation and to understand what's being said. The main reason for building this service is to provide a social media early warning system of the political landscape leading up the UK General Election on 5th May.

We have called this tool 'Politicalist.com' and have put a holding page up on the URL for now. If you would like more details about this service and would like to be a possible Beta tester, then just leave me a request in the comments below.

Social Networks World Map

Vincenzo Cosenza from Italy has put together an updated version of his Global Map of Social Networks, 6 months on from producing his first one in June.

This map collated with data from Alexa & Google Trends shows the ongoing domination of Facebook as the main Social Network in 100 out of 127 countries.

Online retail will be 20% of all UK sales

Despite the economy shrinking by 0.4% in the last quarter, by 5.9% overall in the last year and now with the UK officially entered its longest period of recession in 54 years, there's some good news....

According to a report from Kelkoo recently, £8.9bn will be spent online this Christmas, that's 20 pence for every £ spent!

In a report by the Centre for Retail Research on behalf of Kelkoo, online shopping is anticipated to grow by 24% on last year!

More here:
http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/co_17053-kelkoo-press-release-christmas-2009.html

Socialnomics

Ignoring the Fatboy Slim soundtrack, this is a good summary of the current figures and impact of Social Media

How much Google WILL know about you

The other week I posted about Google and what it now knows about. At the end of this posting I signed off with the comment "What's next?".

Little did I know that Google, as well as knowing what you've done, it now has a pretty good idea what you're going to do. Yes, that's right, using its extensive index of what it knows already, Google can have a pretty good guess at what's going to be searched for.

So how does this help the company online marketer? Well, by predicting search trends, it gives you a pretty good idea what budget to set aside for paid search terms on errr.... Google Pay per Click.

Dammit, I should have seen it coming!

Online retail, growth ahead

The good news:
Online retail is still estimated to grow, despite the global economic crash-landing the financial markets performed last year.

The bad news:
The growth from previous years is not sustainable, so you'll have to put up with single digital growth very soon!

This all kinda makes sense as its not possible to grow a market beyond the total possible number of potential customers. (See http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007142 for some US-centric info.) However, its obvious that the mad days of the eCommerce teenage years are now changing into something more like maturity.

Hurrah!

Some light reading

Here are a bunch of things I haven't had time to fully digest and comment on today:

• The 10 major (US) newspapers under threat:
  http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1883785,00.html
  
• Touching story from Steven Levitt's blog about children
  http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/one-more-reason-to-be-nice-to-your-children/
  
• Business Week's Twitter-sourced reasons for the decline of print media
  http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db2009039_236056.htm
  
• The digital plan of Lord Carter
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7934990.stm
  (Note: I happen to think in the PRS vs YouTube battle that "Big You" will win eventually, perhaps once the artists realise they're getting b****r all money now and even less chance of it in the future)

UK online retail & travel future looks rosy

According to Forrester's research report, the future of online travel and retail in the UK looks quite good.
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,45345,00.html

"Despite the current recession, we expect online retail and travel sales in the UK to continue growing strongly over the next six years as consumers move their spending online. By 2014, 37 million UK online buyers will spend £56 billion online "

New Journalism Fundamentals

Jeff Jarvis, who usually blogs over at http://www.buzzmachine.com/ has some interesting data about Interactive Journalism compiled into a presentation

I like this slide deck from the end of 2008 , because it challenges the idea of newspapers online. Rather than them being filters of information, Mr Jarvis knows that the Internet is all about links and relationships, so suggests newspapers understand this as well....

Intj0808pdf

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cuny journalism)

The High Street leads the online

eCommerce has come-of-age in these depressed times, despite the general retail slowdown in December. Neilson released figures yesterday that shows the the top 10 sites had an average 37% year-on-year growth and that 8 of the top 10 are High Street retailers.

Alex Burmaster, of Neilson said:

"It’s not that online retail will be impervious to the tighter financial environment but it has an opportunity to weather the storm better than other elements of the economy, particularly if retailers promote the web as the best way of finding cheaper goods in the most efficient and convenient way possible.”

Back in the dotcom era (some 9 years ago now) online-only retailers claimed that High Street players would die off. Now it seems that a lot of those High Street stores are leading eCommerce players.

UK Online sales grew 30 percent in December

For those who didn't read the Financial Times front page today, the British Retail Consortium and KPMG have released December's trading figures and its not good news. This report is headlined the "WORST DECEMBER IN SURVEY’S HISTORY" (since 1994) and says that UK retail sales values fell 3.3% on a like-for-like basis.
Note:
I'm always a little suspect of retail figures that compare sales from the same stores over two years, as no major retailer I know has exactly the same stores from one year to the next.

Although "The shift in consumer spending is that they are spending less" (no prizes to KPMG for that startling piece of insight), there are some things that are bucking this trend. In fact, the same report states that sales of "Non-Food Non-Store" sales, in other words those transactions which take place over the internet (or via mail order & telesales) were up by 30%.

As I have mentioned in my post back in September, this isn't online's recession yet.


http://www.internetretailing.net/news/online-sales-grew-30-in-december-says-brc

The growth of online video in 2009

All signs are that 2008 was a growth year for online video and www.youtube.com in particular. A report this week from Comscore stated that that U.S. Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during November 2008, an increase of 34% from the same month in 2007. This report gives some pretty impressive statistics about America's digital video viewing habits, such as "the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video".
However the market is more fragmented that I first imagined. Although Google sites (Youtube, Google Video) take the lions share of 40%, all other players are represented in single-figured percentages.

And the signs are that this increase will continue into 2009. Video should also increase in length, with companies now realising that its just not enough to post all your previous 30 second commercials up as a public archive of your historic agency spending. This trend should evolve into something better and richer for the viewing customer. E.g. A firm's Corporate Social Responsibility video, the CEO's keynote / shareholder address or a public response to a critical (and hopefuly wrong) YouTube posting.

Or perhaps the increase will just be fueled by so many people now "doing personal projects from home" during the economic downturn!

its not digital's recession

An old friend (I've known him for about 8 years, he's not old in years!) asked me the other day what I thought the business climate in the eCommerce and on-line marketing space, especially in the UK, would be like from about mid 2009, once the worst of the economic difficulties were passed.

Here was my perspective:

1. The market for online (eCommerce, Marketing and general digital stuff) is still going to see growth in the next 3 or so years. There are various predictions by intelligent and well-regarded people about what this growth will actually be, and most of these have however been lessened in the recent economic climate. However none are fore-telling a short-medium decline in the online space!
Note:
Despite Ad Age's recent article announcing a 'crater in online sales', which eventually admits:

holiday e-commerce sales will ultimately match the $29.2 billion spent during November and December of last year

2. There is still the view that buying online is: easier, cheaper and providing a greater selection - without the: hassles, petrol usage, parking fees/fines and other burdens that accompany a shopping trip

3. Online Marketing is an accountable science, that shows (almost) instantly what works and sells.... and what doesn't! Showing a Return On Investment is key right now and I don't think this will go away, even when the market picks up in a year or two.

4. London is the home of the UK (and possibly the European) digital comunity. There are lots of networking events still and great people to meet & work with. Although Silicon Valley and SF is the home of the new economy, London is its hard-working cousin over the Atlantic

5. Its still a fun industry to be in now. There is still work in digital (albeit less highly-paid consulting roles) but the full-time market for online people is still OK.

So, for now, it doesn't look like its online's recession.

Online Newspaper Revenue... still dropping

But instead of blaming their monetisation strategy or a declining product, what have they claimed is the reason? .... According to the New York Times the reason is that they have too many adverts.

So, despite online advertising revenues growing, newspapers claim that with a huge site with lots of adverts comes the awful burdon of generating sufficient advertising dollars across all of it. Those days of generating huge online editions that were not only copies of the paper-based product, but enhanced versions with loads of additonal topics/opinions/comments, may be a thing of the past.


Yes, you did read that right. Newspapers online are considering reducing the size and number of adverts they display (and some are already doing it) .

Note: The problem apparently comes when everyone wants to spend money buying up the homepage, but don't care about the rest of it. Therefore newspapers struggle to find the right online ad sizes that they can sell premium advertising revenue for.

To quote media economist Robert Picard,

"newspapers keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner. This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."

Does this mean...

• That newspapers have to buck the current trend of blogging and building social networks to create inventory?
• That they have forgotten about seriously monetising their long-tail of niche content?

Perhaps. Or just possibly as Robert Picard says, "they are just trying too hard".