The Digital Marketing Tube Map

A interesting breakdown of the digital marketing space in the form of a tube map has been put out by the folks at Hallam Internet.  Tube maps are likely the first successful infographics and to many folks in the UX space they represent an important user experience that effectively abstracts a complex reality.

Digital marketing is indeed a complex reality in need of better user experiences.  Take one please.

Read more in the original post at Hallam Internet.

Constant Social Disruption

I was interviewed by Ryan Joe from Direct Marketing News for a 2013 social marketing tech trends post that was posted originally on January 17, 2013.

In the post I talk about three areas of particular interest to marketers that will influence the way in which brands invest in and use social media tools: using analytics to better understand social consumers and ROI, geo-location, and greater use of paid social media like Twitter's Promoted Tweets or Facebook's Sponsored Stories.

Excerpts:

On ROI: “Marketers are still looking at likes and followers as those are the foundations of the social environments,” Watson says. These metrics are an easy way to measure how many people are using social to communicate with a brand. “But now we've expanded it to look at traffic sources and actual interactions we're having with customers across platforms.” 

This speaks to a maturity in the analytics that enable this sort of insight, as well as marketing departments hiring more tech- and socially-savvy marketers familiar with tools that allow brands to see customer journeys more holistically—many of which begin and end on a social platform. Consider a public complaint about a lobster roll tweeted to @AuBonPain, an emailed apology and voucher, and the customer's thankful comment on the Au Bon Pain Facebook page. 

For brands, the ultimate benefit to having this 360-degree customer view is that they'll be able to understand customer lifetime value. “Being able to look at the difference of revenue per user from a social customer versus customers on more traditional channels,” Watson explains. “And what impact do clicks really have on the bottom line.”

On geo-targeting: Geo-targeting is becoming so common in social media, it's practically table stakes at this point. Global brands have local presence and can optimize campaigns for specific geographies. “I don't think [this capability] is just coming from Foursquare,” Watson says, “but from mobile ad providers, LinkedIn, Twitter, and it's an expectation at the ad-network level and publishing-provider level.”  

It's this latter area where geo-targeting has yet to catch on, Watson explains. The way ad networks geo-locate—by a device's IP address—makes it difficult to implement the capability, especially because there aren't any industry-wide standards. By contrast, social networks typically geo-locate based on where a user says he or she is, and publishers do the same based on an in-house database that describes where their users are. Both, of course, might have accuracy issues—but at least it avoids the complication of a single user owning three different connected devices and thus, three different IP addresses. 

“Geo-targeting should be table stakes,” Watson says. “But until it's fully integrated into the ad networks, and multiple ad purchases [under] one set of geo-targeting rules can be deployed across multiple publishers, it's still a work in progress.”

We also had a good chat about paid social augmenting content marketing and more traditional demand gen efforts.  Read the full article here: http://www.dmnews.com/the-constant-social-disruption/article/276559/

9 social stats for marketers

HubSpot has been banging the pots loudly at Inbound (where a lot of my marketing team from HootSuite is there as the Presenting Sponsor, speakers, dressed in a giant owl costume, etc)

The HubSpot team have been peppering the awesome content on the interwebz at the same time and I loved their collection of great stats that point to the state of the nation for marketers across all the areas of tech that they provide.  The following nine social marketing stats really do paint a great story of where we are today and what the current opportunity is for us all to move the needle.

1) Failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15% increase in churn rate for existing customers. (Source: Gartner) 

2) 37% of brands would like to use social media engagement to create customer-tailored marketing campaigns. (Source: Forrester) 

3) 75% of B2B companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement. (Source: Satmetrix)

4) 51% of the top 20% of B2B marketers generating leads through social media use social sharing tools, compared to the industry average of 39%. (Source: Aberdeen) 

5) 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Source: Aberdeen) 

6) Marketers spend an average of 4-6 hours a week on social media. (Source: Social Media Examiner) 

7) Currently, marketers allocate 7.6% of their budgets to social media. CMOs expect that number to reach 18.8% in the next five years. (Source: CMO Survey) 

8) 60.2% of marketers are looking for analysis options, as well as other analytics options, in their social media management tools. (Source: SEOmoz) 

9) Regardless, marketers still continue to struggle with integrating social media into the company’s overall strategy. On a scale of 1-7, only 6.8% of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” into their strategy (the highest rank for the question), while 16.7% believe that it's not integrated at all (the lowest rank for the question). (Source: CMO Survey) 

Check out the full article and stats here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33529/33-Stats-That-Paint-a-Picture-of-the-Future-of-Marketing.aspx#ixzz24xqDSF7o

Exploring Social Business Patterns

Over the past several years I have been part of a shift in marketing, design, development and enterprise software that has undergone fundamental shifts due to changes in the patterns of management and the patterns of product development and marketing.  This shift, in its current iteration at the edges of my bubble, is the emergence of the social business or social enterprise as it is sometimes referred to.  For now, I will use these interchangeably.

In the early days at Microsoft, community and social ecosystems and the evangelist role itself emerged as answers to the need for broad, engaged conversations around complex shifts in application architecture, development and design.  We leveraged forums, community advocates, content rankings and feedback and constant customer input as both an innovation and a market driver.  At Adobe I was one of the first bloggers (IMHO was my first Adobe blog), built the first evangelism team and worked with developer relations and marketing to leverage social ecosystem development across enterprise, agency and academia as a core GTM approach.

Now at HootSuite, as my focus shifts to expanding market readiness, and hopefully market share, for our enterprise, agency and professional offerings, I have the unique perspective of flipping the mirror around and determining which of the social business patterns are going to emerge as core market drivers and to help our customers and partners understand how this has a specific and positive impact on their bottom line, market share, HR, customer satisfaction and cost of doing business.

We now stand at the brink of another fundamental shift in the way we work - shifting more and more of our activity (not enough yet IMHO) to social platforms, better exploiting our need to communicate effectively and ultimately changing the way in which we model, design, strategize, plan, implement, deliver and measure business activity.

And, while many companies claim turf in this space and large and small agencies and consultancies alike move towards the space I feel like we are lacking some of the fundamentals for comprehension of a common shift in thinking and executing. I fall back on to my days in developer tools and developer relations, our work on architectural standards at both Adobe and Microsoft, and am turning up my quest for patterns.

Following are a potential grouping of how we might categorize some of the social business patterns (based on several examples already available):

• - Business patterns of repeatable behaviour and consistent use of methodology or tools
• - Technical patterns of business enablement through provision of platforms
• - Integration patterns that exploit rampant connectivity, API and SDK model
• - Agile patterns that embrace iteration and enable constant innovation
• - Customer experience and UX patterns that redefine business models purely from the perspective of the customer/user
• - Ecosystem patterns that both map and enable the complex systems of business without borders
• 
  

This will be an exercise of research, accumulation, assimilation, creation and curation.

Well understood micro patterns such as update status, share ‘object’ with connections, notifications, and direct response, in turn see increasing value through understanding and documenting the macro-patterns that form when used in conjunction with each other and specifically change an aspect of how we do business, such as how we develop, market, sell, measure or report.

Seeking patterns of a revolution in communication that signal the growth of the social business.

bitpakkit top tracks on ReverbNation for 2011

Throughout most of the year I have been in the top forty, often in the top ten, on ReverbNation for electronica in my region. If you are on an iDevice you can get the same versions of these tracks at soundcloud.com/bitpakkit or in the Soundcloud app.

Posted via email from bitpakkit

The Social Consumer (Infographic)

The social consumer, all data'd up in the infographic below from M Booth and Beyond, lays out the differences between different types of sharers and purchasers. This unintentional category is getting a lot of focus lately. By unintentional, I postulate that consumers who also participate in social networks would likely never self identify as such.

The Social Consumer (Infographic)

The social consumer, all data'd up in the infographic below from M Booth and Beyond, lays out the differences between different types of sharers and purchasers. This unintentional category is getting a lot of focus lately. By unintentional, I mean that consumers who participate in social networks would likely never self identify as such.

The World of Social Media in 2011

VideoInfographs shares The World of Social Media in a video infographic that snapshots much of the critical topline data we amassed in 2011.