The Top 7 Social Trends That Will Emerge In 2014

Social Business has few advocates of change more vocal than one of its leading protagonists, Michael Krigsman of ZDNet. “With few exceptions, every company will face new challenges, competitors, and opportunities, as our society grows more connected,” he said in a recent article, and called on executives to, “step up your own skills and lead the charge!” Indeed, business is changing rapidly, but some argue that ‘social business’ is too broad or too vague.

So given Krigsman’s call to action and the need for more clarity, I asked IBM’s Scott Hebner, VP of Social Business to think about the trends in social business that he’s seeing and to provide his predictions as to what we can expect to see in 2014.

1. Social business is not just about collaboration, it’s about unlocking the engines of collective knowledge, differentiated expertise and rapid learning

Social is no longer just about collaboration. Social today is enabling businesses to break down organizational and hierarchical silos and barriers. It’s providing employees an opportunity to share knowledge and locate expertise. In 2014, we’ll see social transform into an organization’s enablement and learning platform, social learning, that is able to offer the ability to share knowledge and expertise through real-time videos and interactive social capabilities.

Social’s new role will be helping to build a smarter enterprise. For example, doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital are already moving in this direction with social; doctor’s across the globe are sharing peer-reviewed training videos and on-demand curricula to demonstrate the latest life-saving techniques in child care, building an ecosystem of well-trained healthcare professionals.

2. Social Businesses will begin to tap behavioral data to help drive decision making

In the past, business has relied on instrumented data — machine generated data — to help drive decision making. With the emergence of social and all the activity taking place over social networks, both internal and external, we now have access to behavioral data that is allowing organizations to analyze sentiment, listen and learn from customer experiences and behaviors and tap into the social pulse of their employees and customers.

With this information we can understand how, why, who, and what of our employees and consumers. This is a unique and groundbreaking capability, tapping into social behavioral analytics to build resilient and secure social business fabrics that collectively deliver value for both consumers and employees alike. In 2014, social behavioral data will be king.

3. The rise of the individual & “marketing as a service”

For most organizations social networking has been a marketing machine, providing the ability to build armies of advocates for your brand. As we enter into the next phase of social, it will be less about how many likes you can get, and more focused on the quality of those likes and who is doing the liking. Social, driven by the new behavioral data, will allow organizations to capitalize on this trend and individualize consumers.

Looking at customers as individuals instead of segments, marketers will now be able to deliver personalized experiences customized to individual or community needs. Social will transform marketing from a function to a service and consumers will reap the benefits.

4. Social takes on talent management

Similar to how marketers will personalize consumers’ experiences, human resource departments will also begin to capitalize on the power of social by integrating it into their Human Capital Management systems in order to deepen loyalty and engagement with employees. In a world where employees move from job to job at a rapid pace, when it comes to human capital, loyalty trumps everything. Organizations are searching for a means to not only recruit the right candidates, but more importantly retain and nuture that talent to become passionate, engaged and loyal.

In 2014, we’ll begin to see organizations tapping social and behavioral data to better understand what is important to employees, what motivates them, why they stay with an organization and much more. Say good-bye to the traditional HR survey and embrace a new set of social behavioral assets to build your elite workforce.

5. The customer activated social enterprise will drive innovations that really matter

For the past several years, social has been laser focused on internal collaboration or pushing out messages to clients and partners. In 2014, enterprises of all types will open up to customer influence, pioneering social and digital innovation and building engaging customer experiences. We’ll see workplaces and marketplaces fusing together like never before; enterprises will be thinking and acting differently in the context of social.

IBM's recent C-Suite study reveals that 70 percent of C-suite recognize the importance of shifting to new models of social and digital interaction to reach customers and new markets. In 2014, we’ll see that the highest performing businesses are those that recognize that digital and social technologies have spawned a new kind of consumer behavior and new ways to work that are highly intertwined.

6. The true convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud

This coming year will bring the true convergence of social business, big data, the mobile workforce, and cloud computing as ‘business as usual.’ An organization’s social business platform will become the universal foundation for how the enterprise works and engages in the marketplace.

The platform must securely connect, empower and energize the workforce without anyone noticing the technology (i.e., performance, it’s bullet proof and it’s secure). The platform should enable self-service, it should process integrity; it should be intelligent and accessible anywhere, anytime.  Equally important is the ability to harvest data of all types and origins, as that is what fuels the personalized experiences that are so critical.  Bringing all these enterprise technologies together in a highly dynamic, ever-changing environment like a social business requires a well architected solution. Thus, organizations consider which platforms to build their social businesses upon, they will want a highly integrated, holistic platform that is based on SMAC – social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

7. Brand journalism will begin to gain traction 

This 7^th prediction doesn’t come from Hebner, but based on my observations of IBM. They have a reported 40,000+ content producers and brand journalists within IBM, some of which are writing for their industry’s most well-known publications. IBM is becoming a powerful media house and does not rely on the media to tell their story.

But volume is only part of the story, as more and more content is being produced, quality and social distribution matter – and that is usually derived from professionals with large social followings. Brands are starting to realize that hiring journalists or professional bloggers with large followings to create content for them will not only give them high profile attention, but provide myriad revenue opportunities as well.

Yahoo provides an example of how companies are starting to capitalize on the trend. They recently persuaded New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to lead their consumer tech reporting. Another example is Jesse Noyes, who was a business reporter for the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald and now Oracle’s (Eloqua‘s) managing editor.

So for me, not only are Hebner’s predictions something to closely watch, but also watch what IBM is doing closely. Take one of their latest hires, Andrew Grill (former CEO of social scoring site Kred). They hired him to be their Global Social Business Partner lead, but I suspect there’s something bigger going on beyond the scenes. I’ve recently interviewed Grill and will expand more in the next few weeks.

Article curated from Forbes

Facebook to roll out video advertising in test

Facebook has confirmed it is testing video advertising, following media reports that it will roll out video commercials later this week.

The social networking website said on Tuesday that it would be promoting a series of videos for the upcoming film "Divergent" this week -- but stressed it was only a test run. 

It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that video ads would begin appearing in Facebook users' feeds on Thursday. 

"As this is a test, we don't have additional details to share at this time, but rest assured we'll continue to refine this new way for brands to tell stories on Facebook," a company spokesperson told CNBC in an email. 

The videos will run automatically in Facebook users' news feeds without sound; users will be able click on the video to hear the audio.

If the test is judged to be successful, Facebook will be in a good position to capture a share of the lucrative U.S. television ad space -- which is expected to hit $81.6 billion in 2017, according to PwC. 

Earlier this year speculation that Facebook would introduce 15-second video ads surfaced, but it is unclear how long the "Divergent" commercials will be. 

Facebook is looking to further increase its advertising revenue which saw a 66 percent rise in the third quarter of 2013 compared with the same quarter last year, with mobile advertising representing almost half of that figure. 

But earlier this year, it struck a cautious note about advertising amid fears that an increased number of commercials would push users away.

The social networking giant must balance its drive for revenue with the user experience, according to Ian Maude, an online media analyst at Enders Analysis. 

"So far there hasn't been a negative reaction from Facebook users and video advertising will really reinvigorated Facebook's business. The tricky part is getting balance between maximizing revenue and not annoying users to the point they leave Facebook," Maude told CNBC. 

Article curate from NBC News

Twitter Tests A New Nearby Location Based Local Timeline

Twitter is testing out a new service called “Nearby”. The idea is that, if you let them know your location, you will be able to see tweets from those in the same geographic location as yourself, even if you’re not following them. Perhaps, in the example the WSJ gives on this, you’ll be able to find out why those three fire engines just raced past lit up? I have to admit that this idea rather interests me because it’s leading to the exact and total opposite of what I’ve always taken the social aspect of the internet (and of social media) to be. That being to free us from the geographic based interest groups that we find ourselves in and allows us to find people based on a commonality of interests rather than just location.

The upper half of the “Nearby” screen is a map where a blue dot pulses over the user’s current location. The bottom half shows a timeline of recent nearby tweets, with icons on the map noting their locations. Clicking on an icon pulls the corresponding tweet to the front of the screen.

As you move around the map, more picture-linked tweets pop up in a manner similar to the way shopping carts spring up when searching for grocery stores on Google Maps.

One obvious possibility here is that Twitter would like more people to let them know their location (this is an option on this service) as that will enable them to offer location based ads to advertisers.

So far so good, an interesting addition to the service perhaps. But the thing that got me musing is that for me, as for so many other people, all of this internet, web, social media stuff has been exactly to free us from the tyranny of being stuck socially in our geography. I’m old enough to recall the days before mobile phones (no, really, I am) and who you met up with, who you could talk to, depended very much on who happened to be around. Subjects of conversation, activities, were near randomly determined by who actually was around. In many cases if was a matter of who happened to be propping up the bar at the pub on that particular evening.

What all of this electronic connectivity has done is freed us from those geographic limitations. Perhaps the first major example was on Usenet, where the strange people who like to talk about economics, or sci fi, of matters environmental, could all go and do those things. No longer did you have to pour your theories about Ricardian Equivalence into the ear of the poor lad trying to have a pint and read the footie scores. It was possible to find people, perhaps a continent away, who were perfectly happy to discuss such matters. That is, each minority interest group was freed from their geographic reality.

Very much the same is true of Twitter, Facebook and all the rest these days: we’re able to follow our interests without regard (other than, perhaps, timezones) to geography. All of which is why it amuses me rather to find that we’re trying to come full circle on this and turn these social media tools back into local ones, based on geographic not interest concerns.

 

3 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2014

Here are three cutting-edge trends that will be at the core of the most successful social media marketing campaigns in 2014.

 

Despite having nearly a decade of experience with social networks, many marketers still find social media a tough nut to crack. But other marketers are transforming how they use social networks in ways that increase brand reach with relevant audiences and drive real ROI.

Here are three cutting-edge trends that will be at the core of the most successful social media marketing campaigns in 2014. These trends aren't magic bullets or industry secrets that will give brands an edge overnight. They're organic strategies that can drive real rewards for organizations with the patience and diligence to implement them.

Increase Employee Advocacy With Social Media Governance

Designating employee advocates is one of the most cost-effective ways to extend brand reach on social media. It can also be a risky endeavor, however, if employees don't have clear guidance on the common do's and don'ts of interacting with the brand on social media.

Brands with a strong base of employee advocates typically have a well-written social media governance policy that serves as the anchor of the employee advocacy strategy. Developing a policy sounds like nails on a chalkboard to most digital marketers, but it really isn't that difficult. 
Developing the policy is just the beginning; your team must implement the policy across business units and keep the policy up to date. A governance policy can mitigate the risk of costly social media disasters and help your employee base work as a cohesive unit. Employee advocacy on social networks will stretch your team's digital marketing dollars when it comes to increasing brand reach.

Enhance Content Distribution Efforts

A recent article by Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner revealed how distribution, and specifically earned media, is a core component to successful content marketing.

Skinner's article quotes a VP of marketing saying, "Marketers always ask me how to make more or better content, and it's almost always the wrong question. The right question is: "How do I get my content in front of the right people?""

As organizations continue to focus on using paid, owned and earned media to increase branded content distribution, social media can be used as a support mechanism to enhance distribution to relevant audiences on social media. Brands that enhance paid and earned media campaigns by distributing this content to relevant audiences on social networks can develop an edge in their respective industries.

Lead With Education, Not Conversation

Research shows that targeted educational content distribution is a much more effective strategy for building audiences than social media conversations. A recent HubSpot study found that all of the top-100 non-celebrity Twitter accounts used targeted content to build these giant audiences.

Conversations on social media are best left to bottom-of-funnel sales cycles and customer service. When building relevant audiences and extending brand reach, it's better to focus on delivering targeted educational content on a regular basis.

These Strategies Aren't Silver Bullets

The strategies mentioned above won't deliver returns immediately, but they also won't take multiple quarters to implement. A bit of smart hard work over the next couple of months can point your organization in the right direction and provide lasting brand reach on social networks. Get started on these strategies today, and explode out of the gates in 2014!

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

Harnessing the Power of Online Reviews This Christmas

It’s holiday season and that means one thing, Christmas presents. With the retail industry set to be caught in a whirlwind over the next month it is clear that this is an opportunity to really make your business stand out from the crowd. And one way of doing this is by harnessing the power of online reviews.

Whatever you might think of them, the power of online reviews cannot be ignored. Whether you’re a small e-tailer, an online giant, or a global blue-chip – online reviews have an impact.

Research from Nielsen revealed that recommendations from acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of ‘advertising.’ A recent blog post from eConsultancy shows that:

    61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision

    Reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales

    47% of Britons have reviewed products online

With the explosion of online shopping – latest figures show that UK shoppers spent £586.9m a week online, on average, in June 2013 (that’s 18.3% up on the same month in 2012) – reviews have taken on a whole new significance. By not allowing customers to rate and comment on your company, you run the risk of online shoppers taking their business straight to competitors that do.

Research from a recent TripAdvisor study also revealed that:

53% of travelers won’t book a hotel if it doesn’t have any reviews. Some 78% say reviews help them to feel more confident in making a booking decision. Whatever way you look at it, if you sell online, then not having online review options is going to have a serious impact on your profits.

5 reasons why you need online reviews

Online reviews are basically a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, which has long been known as the most powerful endorsement a brand can have. Here are 5 reasons you should include reviews on your website:

    Reason #1 – They help you build consumer confidence and trust.

You’re obviously going to be providing the best products and services that you possibly can, so the vast majority of your reviews will reflect this. This builds confidence and trust in customers who haven’t used you before as the more 3-5 star ratings you have, the more likely they are to believe all those people can’t be wrong.

    Reason #2 – They increase your click-through rates (CTRs).

Featuring reviews from your happy customers in search results when consumers search for your product gets you more click-throughs and, in turn, more conversions. Find a platform that feeds your reviews straight into your Google Seller Ratings: on average, ads with Seller Ratings get a 17% higher CTR than the same ads without ratings.

    Reason #3 – They can help improve conversion rates

Businesses that have been using online review solutions show that their online sales have increased anywhere from 7.5% to 60% due to increased trust from skeptical buyers.

    Reason #4 – They give you great content to share on social media

With 92% of people trusting recommendations from people they know, an online review system that lets you share your reviews easily on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will enable your customers to spread trust among their peers, increasing your customer base.

    Reason #5 – They keep your customers engaged

By letting your customers comment on your company and taking the time to respond to them you make them feel valued and wanted. They are more likely to want to become part of the company – PROsumers, not just CONsumers. This goes for negative as well as positive reviews – even if someone is unhappy, by responding quickly and positively you can turn things around.

According to Forbes, where online reviews matter most is in the home electronics market (77% say consumer reviews influence purchase decisions compared to just 23% for editorial reviews) and automotive industries. But they also point out that any business that operates a significant portion of its retail platform online, apart from the FMCG sector, has a lot to lose or gain when it comes to online reviews of products and services.

What next? 5 steps to getting started with reviews

So now that you know why online reviews are a must-have for your business, and how to use them to win more customers and more repeat business, what do you do next?

You need to:

• Embrace the new world of online reviews and learn how to make them work for your business to increase conversions.
• Review your online review platform options and choose the one that best suits your needs. Can you respond to reviews? Will it push your reviews to Google and feed them into your Google Seller Ratings? Can it share them easily to social media platforms?
• Get your platform up and running and start collecting reviews from your existing customers before your competition does.
• Respond to your reviews, good and bad, and share them across all of your marketing channels.
• Sit back and watch as your glowing reviews generate more business.

Has this post got you thinking about the power of online reviews? 

Article curated from Business 2 Community

Email Marketing: How to Write Subject Lines That Get Clicks

If you don't grab customers with your subject line, you've lost them. Check out these pointers for crafting one that makes people click.

Think you know email marketing backwards and forwards? Able to dash off a contact email or sales pitch without a second thought? Check that impulse, because you may get only a fraction of the responses you could receive with some thought and experimentation.

That may not seem surprising if your professional life has been steeped in direct response. Some of the old tested rules of thumb in print would have been startling the first time you heard them, like use the word "you" in copy and write headlines longer than seven or so words. Such fundamentals came from experts who had done extensive testing that pitted one variation against another, time and time again, from many marketers, to learn what patterns tended to hold true.

When it comes to email marketing, mass email vendor MailChimp has just added to what marketers know with a big comparison of subject lines to response rates. The company looked at 24 billion emails sent and 22,000 words in emails sent in the U.S. with tracking. Each email had to go to at least 500 people and the client must have sent at least 10 previous campaigns. In other words, no complete novices and stick to one national demographic for a more reasonable analysis. Even though it was somewhat self-selecting, as only MailChimp clients could wind up in the data pool, the results are still worth considering. Here's what they found.

Personal Works, Chumminess Doesn't

Put the first and last names of recipients into the subject line and you're doing a third of a standard deviation better in open rates than average. That's almost double as effective as using a last name only and close to four times as effective as using a first name only.

And while talking about first names, the effect depends heavily on the industry. Government gets the biggest email open bang for the buck when using a first name only. Creative services and agencies get maybe half that amount. Politics, less. At the bottom is the legal industry, where using someone's first name in the subject line will actually drive many people away from opening the message.

Don't Use the Word 'Free' So Freely

"Free" is supposed to be one of the magic words that make people open messages. When it comes to email subject lines, however, adding free often does nothing. According to MailChimp, on average it helped 0.02 standard deviations. Compare that to the term "freebie," which resulted in a 0.26 standard deviation. In other words, freebie rules. Furthermore, the use of free varies widely in effectiveness, with recruitment and staffing, restaurant, and beauty and personal care enjoying the most benefit. The industries where it did badly, actually lowering response, were surprising--travel and transportation, real estate, and retail saw drops in their response rates.

Keep Things Positive

Creating the perception of time sensitivity is an old direct marketing trick. "Urgent," "breaking," and "important" all performed relatively well. But go too negative, like using the word "cancellation," and you could see a drop in response.

There is more that you should read for yourself. The big point is that the need to test and refine language, images, concepts, and every other aspect of marketing has only become more critical.
 

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

For the Holidays: Your Digital Marketing Checklist

Here's a guide to digital marketing throughout the holidays, in four channels

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas--at least online.

With Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and the abundance of shopping in between, businesses around the world are already unleashing their of holiday marketing campaigns. These digital recommendations will help you get the most out of your holiday marketing dollars.

Paid Search
Stand out from the competition by focusing on the details. You can do this by putting together seasonal paid search campaigns using the season's highest searched keywords.
For example, the query volume for '"sale" keywords consistently increases during the holidays. Take advantage of this trend by using sale terminology in your ad copy. Leverage incremental search queries, rotate holiday ads that are closely derived from the ads that have worked the best for you, and use day-parting to massively scale up and down during short time periods.

It's also important to pay special attention to the unusually short stretch between Black Friday and Christmas this year. Because Thanksgiving falls on November 28, the shopping period between the two shopping holidays is shortened to a mere 25 days.

With less time for consumers to tackle their holiday shopping, researchers are expecting consumers to start earlier. You can encourage early shoppers to become early buyers through pre-Black Friday and pre-Cyber Monday promotions and perks. Make sure to keep your analytics and retargeting up-to-date so that you can see which of your products get the most views, which reviews are the most read, and which items get added to wish lists. Use this data to figure out which products are likely to be in the highest demand. That'll help focus your digital efforts later in the holiday season.

Social Media
During last year's holiday season, traffic to social media sites converted at a rate 77% higher than it did during the rest of the year. Social media campaigns for the holiday season are starting earlier each year, which means you need to gear up earlier too if you want to take advantage of relatively low costs.

Display
Display ads allow marketers to target individuals who have previously interacted with their brand on social networks and other websites, making this second touch point more likely to convert. Display ads also allow marketers to target individuals based on the particular device that they use to interact with their brand.

In addition to targeting capabilities, display advertising is ideal for updating your creative with relevant offers. While you should be doing this anyway, the holiday season provides a unique opportunity to target users on a granular level because of the increases in individuals' online activities. The more data you have to work with, the better you can target your best consumers or qualified leads. The prices of available inventory skyrocket during the holiday season, so it's important to target only the most relevant customers.

Out of sight is out of mind, so don't allow your brand to slip from your customer's minds. Stay in front of them with display advertising.

Email
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways for marketers to reach consumers at the last minute and on modest budgets. That said, customers will receive hundreds of emails a day during the holiday season. The majority of online shoppers will use an email during their path to purchase, so make your email marketing campaign count with dynamic content that is relevant and tailored to users.

Customize your holiday email content with gift specifics such as pricing, who will be receiving the gift, unique gift categories, product type and best sellers. Consumers will appreciate the unique content, and your email campaign will have a better chance of increasing ROI.

Article curated from Inc. Magazine