Online Real Estate Technology

What a fantastic response we’ve had to our next social media training day in New Zealand, over 550 real estate agents are confirmed as attending the 2 sessions on the day, we still have room for a small number of additional places for agents who’d like to attend the afternoon session on Wednesday the 6th October.

Location is The Great Northern Room, Ellerslie Event Centre, Ellerslie Racecourse Auckland New Zealand, as I mentioned earlier the morning session is now fully booked, so the only session available is the afternoon session commencing at 1:30pm.

You can download the flyer with all the information on the sessions Social Media Training Day New Zealand Registration Form or you can book by faxing the completed registration form to 00617 5534 1046, you can also email your registration form to amazing@iangrace.com.au or info@mikeandrewconsulting.com

Room is limited, so the earlier you register, the more likely you’ll reserve yourself a place.

Your speakers for the day will include Ian Grace and Mike Andrew

Nearly three-quarters of blog posts don’t reflect corporate messaging

Marketers and other corporate communications professionals may sometimes feel they have a thankless task: carefully craft messages about their company’s thought leadership, social responsibility efforts and new product or service launches, only to find those messages distorted as they’re disseminated through the media.

PR and communications firm Burson-Marsteller analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies in the Financial Times Global 100 list of firms and discovered a large gap between the messages that went out and how they were covered on blogs.

Message distortion was highest for companies in Latin America and the US, with a global average of 69% of blog postings not reflecting the message companies were trying to send. According to the report, bloggers tended to include “opinions, personal experience, knowledge of competitors and products, and speculation.”

Distorted messages are not a new phenomenon; they have been a problem in mainstream media as well. Still, the message gap between companies and the traditional media is significantly smaller: Less than half of all messages in mainstream media failed to reflect company messages, and here the US performed above average.

But as blogs continue to grow in importance and become integrated in mainstream outlets, along with the growth of other forms of social media, the chances for message distortion are likely to be high.

One way companies can combat the message gap is to make the most of owned media. If companies create their own compelling content and distribute it across social networks, there is no room for such a gap. Bloggers are not likely to simply reprint such old-media items as press releases, but relevant branded content can attract links across Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social web.

According to the “2010 Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability” study from King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42, 73% of US companies with a social media strategy were using branded content they created in their campaigns. Such original content was considered the most important part of a successful social campaign, with nearly half of respondents calling it “extremely important.”

About a quarter of small businesses now marketing via social media

After climbing steeply, according to research from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, small-business adoption of social media marketing has plateaued at 24%.

The study of US small business found that those that do market via social media primarily use Facebook (82%), and that the most common activities are maintaining a company page on a social network and posting status updates or links to interesting content. About half of businesses that used social media also monitored brand chatter on social networks.

As small businesses have gained experience with social media, some have realized their expectations for the channel did not line up with the reality of the social web. As the wider marketing world begins to look at social as more of a loyalty channel than one for acquisition, small businesses are also finding that their hopes for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers have not been fully met. By contrast, somewhat fewer small businesses had expected to use social media as an engagement channel, but nearly two-thirds have had success in that area.

The most common business objectives small businesses have achieved through social media marketing tell a similar story: Customers are connecting with companies through sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, but relatively few sales leads have been received through the sites.

Small businesses have found other frustrations as well. Many say their efforts take up more time than they had expected, although that percentage dropped from 50% to 43% between December 2009 and June 2010, suggesting companies are being more realistic about what’s involved in social campaigns. At the same time, however, the percentage saying their business had been criticized online nearly doubled, reaching 29%. Still, just a tiny 1% of small businesses said their image was hurt more than it was helped by social media—a number that’s also down, from 6% in December.

Facebook posts with images posted on a Friday morning offer marketers maximum effectiveness, according to a new white paper from social media management company Vitrue.

Image Attachments More Effective than Video, Text
Comparing posts with image attachments to those with video and text attachments, “The Anatomy of a Facebook Post” found that image posts received 22% more engagement than video posts and 54% more engagement than text posts. Video posts received 27% more engagement than text posts.

While image and video being more engaging than text in Facebook posts is fairly intuitive, Vitrue analysts found image beating video in terms of effectiveness somewhat surprising. To explain this discrepancy, they cited image being easier and less time-consuming than video for the consumer to view and manipulate, as well as the difficulty of creating a high-quality video and problems many mobile Facebook users have viewing video.

TGIF
While most salaried professionals are happy to see Friday arrive, Facebook marketers should be even happier than most. Friday is the best day of the week to launch a Facebook marketing post.

Friday Facebook posts produce 64% more shares, likes and comments than posts made on Sunday, the day of the week with the lowest engagement. Friday posts are also 13% more engaging than Saturday posts, 7% more engaging than Monday posts and 3% more engaging than Tuesday and Thursday posts.

High Noon Marks Drop in Post Effectiveness
Dividing the day into 12-hour time blocks, posts made in the morning (the first 12 hours of the day) get 65% more engagement than posts made in the afternoon, or second 12 hours of the day. Vitrue suggests this correlates with the theory that people check Facebook first thing in the morning before the day gets busy.

Consumers Like Facebook Discounts
The prospect of receiving discounts is the number one driver for consumers to like a brand on Facebook, according to a new study from ExactTarget and CoTweet. Data from “Facebook X-Factors” shows that the highest percentage of consumers (40%) is motivated to like a brand on Facebook by discounts and promotions.

Almost the same percentage (39%) is motivated by showing support for the brand. However, two other popular reasons – getting free samples or coupons (36%) and updates on upcoming sales (30%) tie into the discount/promotion motivation. Other popular drivers include staying informed about the activities of a company (34%), getting updates on future products (33%), and fun or entertainment (29%).

Education and interaction (13%) are the least-popular reasons to like a brand by a substantial margin.

The next social media training day, this time for real estate agents will take place in The Great Northern Room, Ellerslie Event Centre, Ellerslie Racecourse Auckland New Zealand on Wednesday the 6th of October.

The morning session is now fully booked, so the only session now available is the afternoon session commencing at 1:30pm.

You can download the flyer with all the information on the sessions Social Media Training Day New Zealand Registration Form or you can book by faxing the completed registration form to 00617 5534 1046, you can also email your registration form to amazing@iangrace.com.au.

The afternoon session is filling very fast as room is limited, so the earlier you register, the more likely you’ll reserve yourself a place.

Your speakers for the day will include Ian Grace and Mike Andrew

I’ll look forward to working with you on the day.  

Campaigns to acquire new customers have not taken off

Social media marketing has been around for several years, and as marketers begin to converge on best practices and use the channel in more uniform ways, it is emerging that their top goals are brand awareness and cultivating customer loyalty. Conversely, customer acquisition through social media is less important.

A July 2010 survey of US marketers by the Direct Marketing Association and COLLOQUY found that brand awareness was the most popular objective of social media efforts, followed by customer growth and loyalty.

A July eROI study similarly showed brand awareness was the top goal of US marketers using social media, and business-to-business (B2B) marketers reported the same to BtoB magazine and Business.com. In April, search marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa cited increasing brand awareness and improving brand reputation as the two objectives for which social media marketing was most effective.

The DMA and COLLOQUY also looked at average marketer spending in various areas of social media marketing and how it changed over time. While marketers started out in 2008 spending similar amounts on branding, customer loyalty and customer acquisition, by 2009 customer acquisition budgets had failed to grow as quickly as the others. Customer acquisition budgets more than doubled twice between 2008 and 2010, but they still lagged behind the even more dramatic growth of spending in other areas.

The report noted that customer acquisition is a more important goal for smaller companies, which often use social media as an inexpensive marketing channel. Those companies are devoting budget to gaining new customers through social media, but by definition their budgets are small. They are overshadowed by large companies who have chosen social media primarily as a venue for cultivating customer loyalty and spend more heavily in that area.

Marketers looking to push out the most effective messages to opt-in recipients must understand how audiences differ across channels and what causes them to connect with brands. Marketing venues that seem similar may differ strongly if their users have different needs and motivations.

According to the final edition of ExactTarget’s “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” report, the differences between email, Facebook and Twitter also include their influence on customer loyalty.

Daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely as daily Facebook users who “liked” a brand to say they were more likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower. What’s more, Facebook fans were the most likely group to actively disagree with the question. Subscribers to opt-in marketing emails fell in the middle.

The pattern among Twitter followers, email subscribers and Facebook fans was similar when asked about whether they would recommend a brand. A third of Twitter followers said they were more apt to make a recommendation now that they followed a brand, compared with 24% of email subscribers and 21% of Facebook fans. Again, those who “liked” a brand on Facebook were most likely to actively disagree with the statement.

A February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey also found that Twitter followers were more likely than Facebook fans to say they had an increased chance of buying or recommending the brands they connected with in social media.

These factors make Twitter followers attractive to marketers, but as the ExactTarget report notes, because of Twitter’s much smaller user base just 3% of US internet users follow a brand through the microblogging service. Those who do follow brands on Twitter are likely to be influencers in general, while Facebook users are more like the average consumer. And since Facebook users often become brand fans on the site because they are already fans in real life and want to use the brand as part of their self-image, it may be more difficult for them to actually increase their spending or advocate for the brand more than they did before “liking.”

Mobile platforms and location-based networks could take social marketing to the next level

As the increase in smart device ownership helps put the mobile web in the pocket of more and more Americans, mobile will play a greater role in all forms of content consumption—including social media.

US marketers surveyed in June 2010 by PRWeek and MS&L Group believed mobile social would have important consequences for their brand. Asked which social media efforts would have the greatest effect on their company, 17% said more usage of social media on mobile platforms and a further 12% cited uptake of mobile location-based social networking.

Another 4% said investing more in Twitter would be their most important effort. While a majority of users access Twitter from their desktop, the microblogging service is a major example of greater use of social media from mobile platforms. According to the company’s blog, mobile usage of the site rose 62% in about four months, and mobile sign-ups increased from 5% of the total earlier in 2010 to 16%.

Currently, PRWeek and MS&L Group found that few US marketers were using specifically mobile-based social media tools, but the sophistication of smart devices has narrowed the distance between the desktop and mobile for many users.

Much of the marketing opportunity in going mobile lies with the ability to use location data to bring consumers timely messages when they are already nearby and possibly considering a purchase. Social media could prove a smart avenue for such efforts; while pure location-based services like foursquare remain relatively niche, Facebook has picked up location-based check-in services, and social networking has been the single biggest driver of mobile app usage and browsing over the past year.

Four in 10 brand marketers think social creates new challenges to maintaining brand integrity

Social media has changed much about how consumers communicate with one another, and has given them the ability to broadcast opinions about brands, products and services further than traditional word-of-mouth can reach. It has also meant something that can be scary for brands: Marketers are no longer fully in control of the message.

According to a study from branding agency MiresBall and KRC Research, 40% of brand representatives around the world felt social media posed new challenges to the integrity of their brand. More than a third said that social networking sites affected brands significantly enough to bring about changes in marketing strategy.

But with 500 million consumers reachable on Facebook, and a host of other networking sites, services like Twitter and the rest of the social web, the challenges may be worth it. More than half of brand representatives told MiresBall and KRC that social media gave them an opportunity to reach new customers.

Brand marketers were split on whether social media helped create brand loyalty, however. While 35% agreed, another 30% disagreed, with the remainder neutral on the question.

The research also found a disconnect in how marketers thought about their brands and how they tried to reach out to customers on social media. The vast majority of respondents agreed that the brand must define what a company or product is, and that message should be communicated via various PR and marketing channels, including social media, and that the most effective way to communicate about a brand was to stay true to its message. At the same time, marketers were willing to stray from that strategy—especially in the case of social media.

The report suggested that attempts to find superficial social success might be leading brands to create a presence on networks that did not fit with the brand’s personality or use other inappropriate campaigns in the hopes that one would go viral, even if it did not truly convey the brand’s message.

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its July 2010 rankings of the top video properties in Australia based on data from its comScore Video Metrix service. The report found that 81 percent of Australia’s Internet population viewed video online in July, with an average viewer watching more than 7 hours of video during the month.

“Online video has evolved to become an essential part of Australians’ daily web experience,” said Amy Weinberger, comScore vice president for Australia and New Zealand. “As advertisers look for ways to engage with consumers in an increasingly fragmented digital environment, online video offers the ability to reach large audiences in an engaging environment where ads tend to perform well.”

Google Accounts for More than Half of Online Video Market

In July, Internet users in Australia watched a total of 970 million online videos, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 539 million videos viewed, representing 55.5 percent market share. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the Google property. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 29.6 million videos (3.0 percent market share), followed by Facebook.com with 12.5 million videos viewed (1.3 percent market share).

Average Viewer Watched 90 Videos in July

In Australia, 10.7 million unique video viewers watched an average of 90.8 videos per viewer during the month. Google Sites also attracted the largest video audience with 8.5 million viewers during the month (64 videos per viewer), followed by Microsoft Sites with 3.3 million viewers (9.0 videos per viewer) and Facebook.com with 2.7 million viewers (4.7 videos per viewer).

Top Video Ad Networks by Potential Reach

In July, SpotXchange ranked as the top video ad network in Australia with a potential reach of 5.4 million viewers, or 50.7 percent of the total viewing audience. Adconion Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 5.1 million viewers (48.1 percent penetration) followed by YuMe Video network with a potential reach of 4.1 million viewers (38.0 percent penetration).