Girls Are Smarter Blog

ADOTAS – General Motors‘ announcement yesterday that it was pulling its $10 million Facebook advertising budget came at a choice time — mere days before the world’s largest social network was expected to go public — and it’s prompted quite a bit of chatter about what that says about the true value of Facebook, and about GM’s understanding of how to manage its brand online.

Let’s put this in perspective. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, in an article that’s become the main springboard for most analysis of the announcement, GM has decided to stop paying to advertise on Facebook, saying the company hasn’t seen enough positive results to justify continuing to spend there. Advertising had accounted for roughly a quarter of GM’s spending on Facebook-related things — the remaining $30 million was spent on advertising and media agencies’ work in creating and managing content across its various brand pages. While GM is the third-highest-spending advertiser in the U.S. (behind Procter & Gamble and AT&T), its $10 million investment in Facebook ads should be considered against Facebook’s $3.7 billion revenue for 2011 and the automaker’s own total U.S. ad budget of $1.8 billion in the same year. GM is also still engaged in a long process of recovering from near-financial ruin, which led to an infamous bailout from the U.S. government and a real PR black eye over actions that made certain GM executives seem out of touch and insensitive. The company’s in the midst of a long slog of re-asserting its relevance and retooling its image. Meanwhile, companies in all kinds of industries are shifting their social ad budgets around, shying away from Facebook display ads and putting more resources into creating and promoting content users can interact with and share. There is a substantial difference between axing a company’s Facebook display advertising budget and yanking the budget for promoting posts, and trusting the brand’s agencies can create content that’s engaging enough, and that their fans are loyal enough, to spread organically and justify what is still a $30 million investment. The WSJ doesn’t explicitly say GM is effectively doing both of those things, but that’s what its reporting implies.

Clearly, GM isn’t ignoring Facebook; it’s simply reassessing its strategy, and what that means remains unclear. While many voices has dismissed the auto giant’s decision as sheer folly, there’s something to be said for stopping to think about what’s valuable for a brand in social media and how that value should be measured. Over the phone earlier today, Spruce Media (a Facebook Ads API Partner of note) COO Lucy Jacobs said that Facebook has “really done something powerful, which has changed the way advertising works. It’s really about word-of-mouth marketing at scale.” And then the challenge for the brand for understanding what’s most effective is a question of analytics. “I think the brands sometimes don’t understand the metrics of success,” she said. She explained she’s seen brands “struggling to understand what content is resonating with fans and where to allocate ad spend.” And she said a brand like GM, with many different makes and models of products aimed at so many different audiences, might at times “need help navigating which segments of content” are catching on.

For GM in particular, Jacobs explained, Facebook’s payoff is “not about driving to your local car dealership,” but about appealing to customers’ emotions and helping them place the brand in the context of their own lives (especially over long periods of time, considering how rarely most people run out and buy a car). There’s value in that approach, but it’s hard to quantify. If GM is going to pull its spending from advertising on Facebook, while maintaining its presence on the network, she advised, “They’ve got to make their content more viral.”

To Roger Katz, CEO of social media marketing and advertising services provider Friend2Friend, GM’s decision might have been less a statement about Facebook and more a statement about GM itself. “It sends a huge message about the new GM and their willingness to walk from things,” he said. Katz considered the $10 million cut a ceremonial gesture (“It’s a very small sliver” of GM’s total ad budget, he pointed out), and he suggested the company’s timing — right around the time of both Facebook’s IPO and the TV upfronts (“We’re not talking about ESPN,” he noted) — had some significance. “The fact they’d come out and talk about it this week is an interesting message,” he said. “I’m expecting that this kind of announcement is pretty nuanced.”

There’s definitely some nuance if, as Katz suggests, GM actually does get how Facebook works. “Obviously they’re dedicated to Facebook,” he asserted. “People universally agree that Facebook is for engaging [audiences]. GM has these communities. They do engage them. They’re looking at ways of tracking that.

“Facebook is not the place people go first to buy a car,” Katz acknowledged. But he insisted that Facebook is simply too large and too full of opportunity to retreat from. To not cultivate audiences there in some ways is, he said, “mind-blowing,” and he pointed out, “These brand pages are the first branded communities at scale.” And it’s true — brand pages are places where people congregate just to willingly share their enthusiasm for and experiences with a brand. No matter what GM’s Facebook strategy is for now, he cited the $40 million total (ads and content creation) and commented, “If that number is not bigger next year, it’s unfathomable.”

As unwise as it might be to yank its Facebook ad budget, it might be as unwise to suspect GM has entirely spoken its part on this subject. If the automaker is too big to fail, it should be too big to miss the point of Facebook, as well.

ADOTAS – Despite continued volatility in the American economy, IEG projects that North American sponsorship spending will grow by 4.1 percent in 2012, to $18.87 billion. No matter how you look at it, that’s big money. In a world where marketing is becoming more of a science than an art, realizing the ROI on these sponsorships — whether they be for conferences, concerts, festivals or sporting events — can be incredibly challenging. Trying to measure an audience member’s brand awareness or perception from passive promotions such as signage, an advertisement in an event guide or a brochure dropped into a bag is maddening, expensive, time consuming and generally not worth it.

At the same time, tablet usage is soaring. According to research released by Adobe on Tuesday, the share of website traffic from tablets grew more than 300 percent in the past year and will exceed smartphone traffic by early 2013, reaching 10 percent of total website traffic in 2014.

When these two trends are considered together, a magical opportunity presents itself to event marketers. When a majority of attendees at an event that you’re sponsoring have a tablet, it’s time to explore how you can deliver value onto tablets. A smart tablet sponsorship strategy not only provides attendees much more value than the printed event guide, but you can also quantify their engagement levels and continue the relationship after the event ends.

A great example of a rich, engaging tablet app is The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes Film Festival tablet app, released earlier this week. My company, GENWI, partnered with The Hollywood Reporter (THR) to create this app, which incorporates live content that will be updated throughout the festival.

By tapping into the unique qualities of the tablet, apps can showcase a breadth of content and experiences not possible in print form. What is The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes tablet app doing that print can’t? Quite a few things.

• Event Updates at “Twitter Speed:” Event, guides are outdated the minute that they go to print. Changes are inevitable, whether they are location changes, speaker swaps, new sponsors and so on. By providing an easy channel to give attendees the most accurate event information, you earn their engagement and their trust. THR’s app, with over 1,800 screening listings and 3,800 product listings, will be updated throughout the festival, so showgoers should be constantly checking their tablets to plan their activities.
• Let a Tablet be a Tablet: Tablets are purpose-built for deep engagement, rich media and interactivity. An event guide and news is inherently two-dimensional. Think about taking that data and about giving users easy sorts. Think about video, image slide shows and social sharing. These features can give attendees relevant information combined with an entertainment experience.
• Location, Location, Location: It’s a time-tested rule of thumb that applies to tablet apps as well — particularly for events that are spread out throughout a city. Consider an event guide and map mashup — placing events at venues. And if GPS is turned on, then attendees can find out exactly where they need to go next. And, for that extra mint-on-the-pillow experience, the map can highlight fun things to do, big hotels and great restaurants in the area. Your attendees will thank you with higher engagement levels.
• Always Be There: Make sure that your app is available in “offline” mode to accommodate attendees with different data plans and wireless connections. Consider how attendees might want to update the app at the hotel, then have all of the content available with them all day. And, even better, you might want to offer a live connection to attendees after the event is over, with the ability to push notifications and provide updates on your next event.
• Hug Some Trees: Because you will be replacing some paper event guide usage with content delivery onto a tablet, those trees might give you a hug back.

Tablets Deliver Engagement and Metrics to Event Marketers

While many of these “tabletization” features seem futuristic, they are available now. Imagine moving from justifying an event sponsorship with a tablet app that provides quantifiable engagement metrics! By taking this strategic approach, you’re building a deeper connection with your audience at the epicenter of a meaningful — and highly relevant — tablet experience.

 

ADOTAS - With the imperative only increasing for Facebook to deliver a mobile experience that people enjoy as much as they enjoy as the web experience, the network has been ramping up its efforts to look better on mobile. And as Future of Engagement host Murray Newlands explains in this episode of his video series, that’s important for brands, because visuals are elemental in engaging users in social media. He peers into Facebook’s visually enhanced mobile app here, which displays larger images and videos than the previous version. He hints at how Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram relates to its visual strategy, and he points to the explosive growth of some social video apps. The conversation about these apps is divided — people feel passionate about them, whether positively or negatively (see the chart from Alerti below the video) — and Newlands digs into where those conversations are happening and who’s most vocal in them. And he advises businesses to get on top of these mobile/visual trends as soon as possible — while he says these tools are considered “nice to have” right now, he predicts it won’t be long until they become things businesses need to know how to do, and well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wigx_CqrUTQ

 

Negative and positive conversations surrounding Facebook’s iPhone app UI change:

 

ADOTAS - Mobile advertising services provider Velti has shown a good record so far of issuing compelling and easy-to-understand reports painting the landscape of smartphone and tablet advertising and usage, and they upheld that record today, releasing the company’s “State of Mobile Advertising” report for the month of April. Drawing from over 35,000 apps and 45 or so demand sources, the report offers a few key takeaways: AT&T dominates ad impressions and Apple trounces the competition when it comes to devices. iOS only continues to entrench its market share. And mobile advertisers are pushing hard to reach moms.

According to the report, AT&T accounted for 56 percent of mobile ad impressions during April, while Verizon, Sprint and TMobile nabbed 24, 19 and 1 percent, respectively. Sprint gained 6 percent in impression volume, which the report’s authors suggested might’ve come about through the January release of the iPhone 4S.  On iPhones specifically, AT&T held 61 percent of impressions, 28 percent Verizon and 11 percent Sprint.

Wifi remains more popular than data carriers, and increasingly so: Wifi was accountable for 75 percent of impressions versus carriers’ 25 percent, and wifi’s up 3 percent in the last six months in that regard. The report suggested changes in data pricing plans might’ve been responsible for the slight shift.

iOS delivered 55 percent of mobile impressions, up 2 percent from March. Android delivered the remaining 45 percent.

Apple leads in impressions by device: iPhones delivered 20.4 percent of all mobile ad impressions, iPod Touch devices 14.9 percent and iPads 13.4 percent. Samsung, Apple’s closest competitor for devices, collectively delivered just 3.3 percent of impressions, by comparison. Nonetheless, the report saw growth of the new iPad as slower than the iPad 2: The new iPad saw 8 percent of all impressions, while iPad 2, at the same point in time after its release, was seeing 13 percent. The report credits the rise of competitor tablets for this version of the iPad’s figures at this point.

And among the industry categories the report addressed, the category of “women/mothers” saw the highest CPM, $15.15. Finance — on the rise in mobile, according to other reports — was next, at $10.21.

The whole report is available for download on the Velti blog.

 

ADOTAS - It’s a good thing people love talking about Facebook as much as they do, because boy howdy, there are a lot of Facebook-related things to talk about this week. Today’s chatter: Search engine marketing software and services provider WordStream has released stats showing how Facebook’s advertising services stack up to Google’s Display Network. The Display Network reaches across Google properties like YouTube, Gmail and Blogger, and also across 2 million other websites varying widely in readership and content. Can Facebook — which offers half the ad formats as the Display Network, doesn’t support mobile ads and has an estimated (Facebook doesn’t release reports on click-throughs) average click-through rate of a paltry .05 percent for display ads — be bigger in any quantifiable way, or have more impact?

WordStream’s report holds that Facebook has more ad impressions, but the Display Network has broader reach (90 percent of all internet users, compared to Facebook’s 51 percent). Facebook’s revenues fell during the first quarter of 2012, while Google’s rose… barely (by one percent, from the previous quarter). Advertising rates rose 40 percent for Facebook in the first quarter of the year, while click-through rates fell 8 percent. Google offers more targeting options. All told, WordStream found Google came out on top — at least for now. How serious Facebook might get with its ad services after going public remains to be seen. WordStream took those stats comparing the two entities and created this infographic (click to enlarge, as always):

ADOTAS - We all know that sticking all of our business info out onto the internet comes with a number of security risks, and that these risks are still a major inhibitor when it comes to loading and managing data on the internet.

Although cloud-based services afford us maximum flexibility and ease of access to the information that we want and need on a daily basis, that same ease of access and flexibility has also increased our vulnerability. Security breaches are a growing problem at the heart of the internet. Keeping your information safe is a highly specialized field, but most businesses unfortunately put it near the bottom of their list of priorities. This is why hacking groups are frequently able to break into easily compromised sites using simple techniques, directly attacking penetrable servers.

Some say that cloud technologies are just not mature enough yet. Others say that this opinion is fairly ignorant: Cloud-based mail storage facilities have been in existence for half the life of the internet. Amazon Web Services, for example, have been around for well over six years now.

In general, these services have proved to be robust, and security incidents are not commonplace. Other cloud services, such as online accounting facilities and virtual desktop services, are less mature, but despite perceptions to the contrary, they have demonstrated a level of security that is general quite good.

For legitimate email marketing services, the safety of customer data is undoubtedly one of the most important security aspects. Often, though, potential subscribers are still reluctant to sign up for email campaigns due to their personal privacy and data security concerns.

Unfortunately, any system can basically be hacked in some way. An important consideration is how valuable the actual information in the system is. For example, you won’t find hackers trying to steal cooking recipes from a website. But they will spend some time on your website if you store credit card information.

ESPs are acutely aware of the fact that some of their customers’ data is very important to them, and while these services do whatever they can to protect that data, they don’t consider themselves to be at such a high risk for hacking as an institution that stores banking information, for example.

With that said, email service providers generally do endeavor to remove as much of the risk as possible by being in their own private environment and conducting network audits every few months, to make sure their security is in order. As an email marketer, it is important to inform and reassure anyone interested in signing up for your campaign that their data is safe. Consider the following practics:

• Include a link to your security policy in your sign-up form and in the footer of every email.
• In your initial communication emails to new subscribers, make a point of telling them that that you won’t be sharing or selling their info to any third parties and that their privacy is of paramount importance to your company.

ADOTAS – This week’s installment of The Future of Publishing brings together two guys who work as both marketing consultants and content creators: Host Murray Newlands ran into Human Business Works president Chris Brogan at BlogWorld Los Angeles in 2011, and now we’re sharing this video of their discussion. Brogan explains why and how, with all the interest in online video right now, large corporations should use video. “What people are seeking out are more personal conversations,” he says. What that means, he explains, is not that the videos that result should be of poor value, but that they feel more intimate and reflect the customer’s interests more than they trumpet the company’s products and services. Newlands asks him about how companies can convince their fans to create content, and Brogan warns, “Contests are really gamey-feeling. They don’t feel sincere.” But he offers suggestions of how brands might make their customers excited enough about the brand to really want to create content about it. He goes on to offer some tips about blogging. “If you’re going to make something,” Brogan advises, “be clear that you’re passionate about something.”

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the latest insights on the display advertising market in Brazil from its comScore Ad Metrix service, which showed that 190.5 billion display ads were delivered to Brazil’s Internet population during the first quarter of 2012. Dafiti.com.br and Netshoes.com.br ranked as the top display advertisers in March 2012 with each delivering upwards of 2 billion impressions. comScore’s Alex Banks will be providing more insight on the state of Brazil’s online advertising market via a live, complimentary webinar on Wednesday, May 16. For more information and to register, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Events_Webinars/Webinar/2012/State_of_Online_Advertising_Brazil_Webinar

ADOTAS – Pocket-dials and accidental clicks account for the majority of calls businesses receive directly from mobile display ads, according to a report from online and mobile ad company Marchex. In its new MPULSE report, the company (which provides technology designed to block spam calls and exceptionally short calls) looked at 200,000 inbound phone calls to businesses that resulted from mobile searches during the first quarter of 2012, and it found a lot of junk: 76 percent of all calls from mobile display ads were what Marchex considered “bad” — accidental clicks and the dreaded pocket/purse dial. With voice search/automated directory assistance, the study found, 45 percent of all resulting calls were “bad” calls. With online directory partners, it was 37 percent, 34 percent for mobile  directory partners, and 34 percent for major mobile search engines. Looking at the positive side of things — the successes businesses have had through mobile — mobile and online directory partners were tied for the lead in one particular metric: 38 percent of the calls that resulted from each of those two sources were from new customers. Read the full report on the Marchex site.

Marchex also offered five suggested best practices for mobile advertising. First, it advocated for “a variety of connection options to suit their intent,” whether they be click-to-calls, apps, QR codes or anything else. Second, it called for testing for the customer’s ability to call from a number of sources. Third, it advised a wide reach, utilizing web pages, search engines and apps. Fourth, it called for testing and analysis of a campaign’s performance, and fifth, it suggested analyzing the kinds of calls coming in and figuring out, through call centers, whether those calls lead to sales conversions. However — and the Marchex report doesn’t say this explicitly — it would probably be a good idea to, in general, create mobile ads that are actually designed with the physical specifications of the device and the user’s head-space while using a mobile in mind.

ADOTAS – Welcome to the final countdown. Facebook’s IPO is expected to come this week, and with the amount of discussion on the topic since the network filed with the SEC for an initial public offering back in February, you assuredly don’t need us to remind you of that. And let’s face it: While, as an acquaintance of mine who works with a digital ad company just quipped to me a few minutes ago, “a few people are about to get very liquid,” for most of us,  news of the IPO itself is just finance porn. The real news is yet to come, as the results of going public play out for Facebook.

And we’ll see how that goes. We’ve heard quite a few opinions about where this whole thing is going for Facebook, its investors, its advertisers. Some are pretty gung-ho about it. In a statement released a few days ago, Victoria Ransom, CEO of social marketing company Wildfire, predicted that “Facebook could develop its own ad network spanning the entire web and start serving targeted ads on websites that have already integrated Facebook plugins.” She added, “Because of these already-existing plugins, Facebook knows when its users are on these other sites, what they are doing and who they are talking with.” And in another statement, Christian Taylor, CEO of Facebook ecommerce (F-commerce) platform Payvment, called Facebook “worth every penny of $100 billion” for its extensive infrastructure, through which ”thousands of companies… have built their businesses,” and asserted that “Facebook has barely scratched the surface when it comes to mining their social graph data and looking for ways to integrate third-party data to make ads more relevant.” He said the IPO would push Facebook to innovate faster, and called those who question the company’s ability to leverage technology to make the most of its data “simply nuts.” To that end: See Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s promise to investors at the end of last week that the network was “just getting started” with its widely criticized mobile app.

Others are a little more cautious. Eric Wheeler may be the CEO of 33Across, which manages one of the two largest social graphs out there, but he warned, “At 900 million users, their torrid growth rate can’t continue. And, when their growth inevitably slows down, they’ll be pushed to reveal more about their audience to their advertisers. Which, of course, presents a litany of privacy related problems.” This means, he explained, Facebook will have to get smarter about the performance of its display ads, while behaving in a transparent manner. He went so far as to predict, “Ultimately, to please its investors, Facebook will need to do something dramatic to grow its reach: Specifically, they might have to go ‘off Facebook.’ They could choose to do this themselves or partner with another company where they’re making money off their data.” Interestingly, that suggestion kind of dovetails Ransom’s about partnering with publishers that integrate Facebook plugins.

Roger Katz, CEO of social media marketing company Friend2Friend, said measurement of the performance of a social campaign still needed to be addressed in order to judge how much the network is worth, and he advocated for metrics that approached Facebook “in broader terms” than standard metrics for the rest of the web. “Metrics have to evolve to acknowledge that social is ushering in a whole new way of marketing to consumers,” he said. “Those social ROI metrics are emergent, but they will become an extremely powerful method of measuring success.” And meanwhile, Rick Corteville, CEO of digital agency Luxus, predicted that Facebook, to generate more revenue, might have “become more ‘passively omnipresent’ to users. What’s that mean? Well, he also suggested an “off-Facebook” option, “leveraging Facebook Connect to create an ‘AdSense-esque’ network for delivering relevant ads to consumers off of Facebook.” He advocated for more user services on the network itself, like perhaps “allowing consumers to search for others based on common interests.” That sounds like it’d be a delicious delivery on the voyeurism factor that so many Facebook users pretend to not love, but the network would have to handle it tactfully and explain how users can modify their security settings to determine who can view what information they post, considering how many Facebookers also gripe about third parties looking over their collective shoulder.

Anyway, since we’re here, media agency Banyan Branch has assembled an infographic showing how Facebook stacks up to Google, Zynga, Groupon and LinkedIn at their respective IPO dates. It also tracks what happened in the first 30 days after IPO for each of those companies, matched against the average path of all those companies. Banyan takes a look at how the conversation around the company’s IPO compares to the total conversation around the brand — for Facebook, it’s less than one percent (Zynga, which had the most-buzzed IPO of the bunch, saw its own IPO reflected in 5 percent of the conversation). And for good measure, the infographic breaks down its CEOs paychecks for 2011. Check it out: