Social media ROI – dollar value for Facebook Fans?

This is one of my favorite topics in social media. I am sure, this is true for many in this field.

Today eMarketer published an interesting article on the topic.  Based on an empirical formula they came up with, digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex is giving an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands.

The real question is what does this mean to the “rest of the world”. We are at a stage in applying power of social media to business where any insight is valuable,  the real value comes when that insight can be applied in a wider context. Can we really extrapolate any useful information from this study that social media practitioners can apply?

I think attaching a dollar value to fans is not really useful, since the real value varies widely between business to business. There are many aspects of fan interaction that are contributing to the real value,  real feedback on product and services for example.

I am interested to know what the community think about the study.

B2B Social media marketing trends

Last week there was an article in eMarketer titled B2B Marketers Up Social Spend. As the title indicates, it gives some very useful data and projections on B2B social media marketing spending from 3 research studies. For me, I want to read those numbers to see how B2B companies can decide on their marketing mix based on the past experiences of others. More specifically what emphasis should be given to social media in the mix based on the social media marketing spending and projections.  

Here why this interests me, besides the fact that this is a common questions that many B2B business ask: as a technologist if I build solutions for business, what is the best channel to reach my customers – that is other businesses.

These numbers give some idea about the trends and potentially answer to the marketing mix  question. Be warned that the social media marketing is relatively new, where a lot of experimentation happens, there is a risk of overreading these numbers.  

To summarize, the article quotes numbers from 3 research studies:  

1. Outsell’s “Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010.”
2. HubSpot survey on  B2B companies in North America about lead generation through social channels
3. Research study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA) on B2B marketing spending on social media

Here are the main observations relevant for this discussion an my read on them:  

- The over all marketing and advertising spending by B2B companies increased from $127.98 billion to $129billion (less that 1% increase), There is no significant increase in overall marketing spending.  Even though overall increase was small, there is an important shift in the marketing mix.

- Social media spending by B2B companies will grow from 9.9% to 18.4% (almost double) of their marketing budget. Since overall spending is likely to be same, this could be read as  an increase in focus in social media compared to other forms of marketing.  (Warning! This can be the result of increased optimism from early successes)  

- B2B services companies spend bigger percentage of their marketing dollars on social media than B2B product companies. Can we read this as  social media channels are more effective for B2B services than products, or is it that there are more B2B services than products?  

Another useful piece of information presented in the article was graph ranking the social media sites based on their effectiveness (from Outsell study):   

Effectiveness of social media sites for B2B marketers (from eMarketer)

It may be noted that HubSpot survey shows 44%  thought LinkedIn more effective, while 33% thought Facebook in the same way.

Twitter for Business?

I am trying to understand how different social media tools are used in business. I see that Twitter has become the favorite of social media marketing community.  For some reason, I am finding it hard to understand this. May be I am really missing some thing

Here are the questions that I want to find answers for: where does a user (a customer) start his journey to connect with the business? Why should he connect with the business? How many customers care about your business? Do they really care about your business?

To find out more I started at the source itself Twitter 101 for Business from Twitter, as with the main site, it was not helpful to answer any of my questions.

A quick Google search gave many links on this topic, none very useful. Here are some of the things I notice:

- These advices tend to give does and don’ts while there are none

- There are many general comments about tweeting in general, that has nothing to do with business in particular

- Most of these advices apply only to a few businesses

If your customers are not ‘Twitter’ type – most of them are not, these advices do not apply. 

I still believe that simplicity of the service along with the API open up many possibilities, that could bring some powerful applications as we experiment and learn.

Here is an apt  comment that I found from a real practitioner (not a social media gurus ) on Chris Brogan’s post on 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business:

Brooks Brown

Thank you for your recent conversation about our decision to allow our new marketing coordinator try Twitter on for size.

A couple of key points:

1. Our corporate Twitter account (@clarisnetworks) is relatively new. We are still feeling our way through the applicable uses Twitter brings to the enterprise…specifically the information technology industry.

2. At the moment, we are limiting our tweets from @clarisnetworks to corporate announcements, client announcements, and related IT information/news. As we continue to move through the process, we’ll add more strategically-minded information that will assist in our branding efforts.

3. We’re the largest information technology provider in the East Tennessee Innovation Valley, and have done a terrific job at marketing/branding ourselves through other traditional means, and view @clarisnetworks, and Twitter for that matter, as an opportunity to orient ourselves with its possibilities, etc.

Do you remember the first tweet you made? I know mine wasn’t pretty…I didn’t even understand the “@” rule. But alas, as we move forward, we learn and we get better at what we do.

Some have asked if it is responsible to put your corporate branding in the hands of a new employee. I would respond by saying that I would be foolish to view Twitter (less than 1 percent of the US population) as my primary means to promote and market our company. On the contrary, Twitter is a learning platform in the 2.0 realm and a small component of our branding strategy, but one that we believe will play an important role in the near future.

Chris, in response to your specific questions:

1. Our clients, employees and culture make our brand what it is. A brand should never be reserved for a single employee or the CEO of a company. Hearts and minds, hearts and minds.

2. Twitter is considered by many to be a newbie
itself and I tend to agree given the longevity of traditional IM apps, blogs, forums, facebook and MySpace. What better avenue for a new employee to orient themselves with than a relatively new 2.0 platform?

The great fact that I believe we can all agree with is that there are no Twitter rules. There is no handbook, no official do’s and don’ts. Thus, there should be no reason to judge each other’s efforts, but only to support the proliferation of its use and integration into the 2.0 world.

We’re excited about the opportunities that Twitter presents to our business and excited that we have employees who are willing to dip their feet into the 2.0 experience and are confident in time, our viral efforts online will meet and exceed the success we enjoy from traditional marketing today.

I am back…

I have decided to come back… 

I was not keeping up with my posting after I moved to my own domain and now the domain is no more maintained. I realize that maintaining own domain is a distaraction, that gave me one BIG excuse for my shying away from sharing.

The real reason was that I was taken over by many of my experiments in Web that I was engaged in the last two years.  I am back with a realization that is as important to sharing the experience as the experience itself. I got a big “push” when I talked to a close friend about his relatively new blogging “experiments”. 

I have beeing actively looking at how social media is eveolving into a much hyped, yet powerful channel for businesses to engage with their customers. As with any new field,  new rules are being defined, new framework for adotion are being proposed every day, not yet clear what works and what does not. Still every body is pushing their “story” as confidently and aggressively as they can and trying to “make their name”. It is exciting, I want to start by listening, strudying the voices, blogs, companies. I will report my finding as we go. Stay tuned…

Moving…

I am moving my blog to http://sajith.webguins.com/. Please visit me there.

Web based open source e-learning systems

In the last few years I had spent some time helping people remotely to setup systems and software, to learn new technologies, etc. Gradually I started seeing me repeating the same things. So I decided to capture the knowledge in some e-learning system.

I spend a day experimenting with a few web based open source e-learning systems. Usability and interface was very important consideration for me; I didn’t want to spent long hours helping people on how to use the system itself. Since I install this in a shared hosting system which supports only PHP, I have to find one that matches that platform capabilities and limitations.

I tried the following systems:

• eFront
• ILIAS
• Claroline
• OLAT
• Moodle
• Dokeos

and finally settled for Dokeos. Here is a brief comment on each:

eFront: eFront has a very good interface; but has very limited functionalities. I would definitely consider using it if and when they have basic set of functionality available.

ILIAS: ILIAS has a good documentation and support. The screen shots looked very good and it has good set of functionalities. I ran into some library issue when installing the system. I have a very limited interface in my hosting site to install new libraries, so I couldn’t complete the installation. Certainly a good system to look at.

Claroline: Claroline has a simple interface and yet powerful set of functionalities. I felt that Dekeos was an improved version of Claroline, may be it was built on top of Clarione. The installation procedure was very simple and straight forward.

OLAT: This is a Java/Tomcat based system, certainly not good for my hosting environment. The interface and functionalities appeared to be very good from the documentation. I certainly think that this is a good choice for private server installation. I am going to try this in one of these days.

Moodle: This is a very popular E-learning system; but this has a poor interface – both in terms of look-and-feel, and usability. I am not sure why this became so popular, only thing I can think about is that this was first available system. I remember installing this a few years back in my hosting site, but never got around to use it.

Dokeos is similar to Clarione; it has better interface and better functionalities. I certainly liked it. Though your requirements and platform capabilities may be different from mine, but I hope this gives you a short list when to consider using an open source e-learning system. Please drop me a line, if you have any suggestions.

Hello world!

Hello World ! 

I a software professional based in Silicon Valley. I have keen interest in web technologies and computer networking. I spend most of my spare time experimenting with web technologies.

My other interests include social issues around globalization, economics, corporate management, people dynamics in organization, and many more.. I am trying to record, organize, and share my random thoughts in these areas; many I often felt worth sharing, but never recorded. Though the web log is titled as “random thougts”, I am hoping to get to more organized presentation as I post and learn.  I am hoping to come up soon with some thing worth sharing …