Tag Archives: social media

February 18, 2013 · 11:36 am

A Peek Forward

I’ve written before about how the hardest job in digital media and technology is seeing over the horizon.

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Image via CrunchBase

The folks at comScore try to be helpful in that regard and issue an ongoing study about trends and predictions.  As they put it, they “examine… the latest trends in social media, search, online video, digital advertising, mobile and e-commerce are currently shaping the U.S. digital marketplace and what they mean for the coming year, as comScore helps bring the digital future into focus.”  Exactly.

The latest version of the study – The 2013 U.S. Digital Future In Focus Report – came out last week and there were a few nuggets I thought you might find interesting. You can read the entire deck here.

The first has to do with something that content producers have dealt with for years – the perceived mindset that consumers won’t pay for content:

Digital Content & Subscriptions, a category predominantly composed of digital content downloads such as music, movies, TV shows and e-books, ranked as the top-gaining retail e-commerce product category for 2012, its second consecutive year to claim that distinction. The increasing proliferation of devices like smartphones, tablets and digital music players has accelerated consumer demand for digital content downloads, contributing to the 26-percent gain in the category.

So much for that myth.  As it turns out, people will pay for high-quality content delivered seamlessly to all devices.  The next tidbit is related to, or perhaps even drives, the previous finding:

Smartphones continued to drive the mobile landscape in 2012, finally reaching 50-percent market penetration in 2012. Smartphone media usage is dominated by apps, which account for 4 out of every 5 minutes spent on smartphones with mobile web usage accounting for the remainder. Despite Facebook’s leadership in the app market, Google apps dominated the rest of the list of top apps visited in the U.S., with Google Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail and YouTube ranking as the most heavily visited apps next to Facebook.

Consumers are using these devices to access content but I think there’s an opening for some smart company.  Notice that 80% of the usage is not on the mobile web.  I’ve yet to run into a great mobile web experience (although there is a lot of B+ stuff) and so developers are having to support the two big platforms, often with very different degrees of success between the two.  It’s interesting to me that the top mobile apps are all, with the exception of Maps, continuations of a desktop experience.  Instragram (not a top app) is about the only exception to that.

Finally, just as the web became a valuable extension of media’s primary channels, so too mobile is becoming that for the web:

The average Top 25 digital media property extended its reach via mobile channels by 29 percent. Even those with a relatively modest incremental reach in the teens are recognizing that mobile channels represent more than a mere rounding error. The future revenue streams of these media companies depend on effectively delivering content and commerce to their consumers through these channels, and demonstrating why they are an important part of the marketing mix. Failure to meet consumer expectations and aggressively prove the value of these additional channels in 2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition by the time 2014 comes around.

There’s your peek over the horizon.  Now, what are we going to do with it?

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January 31, 2013 · 12:53 pm

Content Worthy Of Your Brand

The biggest challenge I face producing the screed each and every weekday is not in the writing of it. Most of the time the words come pretty easily. The challenge is in finding topics that I think will both enlighten and entertain you guys. Some days it seems as if there’s plenty about which to write; other days I stare at the screen while sorting through hundreds of articles trying to think of something that meets my standard – hopefully yours as well.

Audience

(Photo credit: thinkmedialabs)

That challenge is shared by anyone who creates content: how to produce something that’s worthy of the audience‘s attention. How to produce something that satisfies the attention/value exchange on a fair basis. It’s a challenge that I think is met less and less often (and not just by me!) and let me explain how it might affect you on both ends of the equation.

I guess it’s obvious how it does on the consumer side.  None of us like to invest our time and attention and be served the content equivalent of one of the foams that have gone so out of style in the food world.  These foams are airy and sort of have a flavor but they fade quickly and are pretty unsatisfying.  My real concern is how it affects you on the other end – the business side.

Everyone had become a content-producer.  Companies that make remote controls or eyeglasses are suddenly making content as well.  Sometimes they hire people who once were copywriters but now are “branded content producers.”  Idiots who film their friends at parties are now “rich content generators”.  Kids who annoy their friends over social networks are hired as social media content specialists.  Everyone and every brand produces “content.”

The effect is that we’re all overwhelmed by a lot of crap that doesn’t serve the audience.  White papers that are just ads for a product.  PR releases disguised as microsites.  The answer to this is, I think, not to get caught up in it if you’re a brand.  If you are going to send something out into the world, make it as good as your product.  After all, you wouldn’t let something out of your door with your brand on it that was inferior.  Make it as smart as your audience and worthy not just of their attention but also of the audience with which you want them to share it.  Hire professionals to generate it on your behalf, not your nephew who can speak reasonably well.

Anyone can produce drivel (and no remarks about how this blog proves that point).  Great brands need to produce great content.  Right?

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January 21, 2013 · 12:35 pm

Social and Shopping

How do you think social media influences what people buy?  If you believe a recent report on the influence of social media on shopping this past holiday season, the answer is not much.  As the article said:

online shoppers mostly ignored social channels as purchase influencers,according to survey results from Baynote. Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Instead, online ratings and reviews were most likely to influence both online and in-store purchases (33% and 24%, respectively), with Google search results including a pictured product available by the retailer coming in next for online purchases (26%) and paper catalogs (21%) second for in-store purchases. Not surprisingly, social channels were most influential among younger consumers (aged 25-34), while paper catalogs got the attention of the 45+ crowd.

This was accompanied by another piece which announced that “only 2% of traffic to retailers during the holiday season came from social networks, per figures released by Adobe Systems.”   The article then goes on to say “Adobe isn’t the first to detail social media’s rather small influence over the holiday season.”

I could be wrong about this but given that Adobe is the parent company of one of the large analytics firms, I’m assuming they looked for traffic into shopping carts from social media.  Their question – is social media converting into sales – isn’t the right one.  How about “does social media influence sales?”  I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of what’s on Pinterest is aspirational – something the user wants or acknowledges as desirable.  Maybe it’s a place people use to research gifts for friends?   You will have a hard time convincing me, just based on what crosses my Twitter stream and Facebook news feeds, that people aren’t researching purchases via social media.

The Baynote data is a survey – let’s always remember that what people say and what they do sometimes don’t align.  That said, I think taking “catalogs” as a whole while segmenting digital into pieces (search vs. social vs online stores) is a bit misleading.  It also doesn’t reflect how users may begin with a search, move over to social to check out their connections’ thinking on what they’ve found, and then their use of the online store to buy, perhaps several days (and sessions) later.

Given the continuing and impressive growth of online shopping during the last holiday season I’m a believer in social as a influence.  People spend more of their lives online and that includes shopping.  Maybe these folks are asking the wrong questions.  I’m sure they’d have just as hard  time proving that TV or print resulted in the conversions they’re discussing yet very few people deny those media have an impact.  What do you think?

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