The value of a Facebook fan is……$136.38

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Digiwedo

I remember giving a presentation on Facebook brand pages when the Facebook phenomenon first started to take-off and while most of the resulting questions tended to be fairly standard, there was one that stood out – What‘s the value of a fan? What a great question……one that I couldn’t really answer at the time with any real specifics. Sure, we can talk about engagement, WOM tracking, sentiment and so forth, but what is that fan worth to that brand?

Well, we may just have that answer, or at least a step towards figuring it out. In a recently released paper, Syncapse and Hotspex have jointly developed a model that can places a monetary amount against a Facebook fan. You can download the PDF report here, but topline, here’s what they say. Their model looks at the value of the audience, not just the simple action of becoming a fan. To establish this, they tracked a number of variables – Product spending, loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity, media value, acquisition cost. In the paper, they describe a brand’s fan base a “self-segmented group of highly valuable customers”. I think is interesting on a number of levels as the they’re hinting at a target audience that is in fact built by the audience by the mere fact of networking around the brand.

So, what does the paper say? As you’d guess, it’s about the numbers:

On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those that are not fans
Fans are 28 per cent more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand
Fans are 41 per cent more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends
The average value of a fan is $136.38, but can go up to as much as $270.77, but can also drop to $0.00

I’m planning to write more on this later in the week, but I imagine we’ll see a few more developments over the coming weeks and perhaps even some alternative opinions…..

You can’t own an entire communications channel, just ask the Murdoch’s

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Digiwedo

According to the latest PR GAP study, PR “owns” social media. More than a quarter of companies they surveyed stated that they gave 80 per cent or more of the budgetary control of social media to PR. In addition to control of the budget, almost a quarter said that PR is also the strategic lead when it comes to social media. But, does PR really own social media? Can you possibly own an entire communications channel? The answer is no.

Does advertising own TV? Media buyers outdoor display? Do the spin doctors and publicists get the red tops? Again, no….PR doesn’t own social media, we just get it more than the other disciplines. Ask any PR person what the key to their success is and they’ll tell you – developing and maintaining relationships with a diverse range of media, making sure that the conversations they’re having with each one is both meaningful and rewarding. It’s this that put’s PR in the driving seat when it comes to social media, but it doesn’t give us ownership of it.

This space is going to require a truly integrated approach to make it work, having a conversation is fine, but what are you going to talk about, what do you want to share? Ultimately, the question is this – what’s your brand story? This isn’t a PR-only job, it’s a wider job that requires brains from our buddies in advertising, branding, media buying, research. Don’t agree? Put it this way, if PR owned TV, there wouldn’t be any TV.

So, I go back to my initial point – you can’t own an entire communications channel. But there is something that you can own in social media – you brand story. But like any good story, it’s got a lot of different characters involved, many twists and turns and ultimately, that story means something different to everyone that reads it….you get me?

Is IR the next big social media milestone for PR?

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Digiwedo

I came across an interesting press release from Furlong PR suggesting that FTSE 100 companies are missing on the investor relations potential of social media. The press release mainly cites some research that Furlong has conducted which looked at a number of FSTE 100 corporate websites. Unsurprisingly, most of them lack any kind of social media elements, even the basics such as RSS feeds. In the release, they also make reference to a Canadian company that began integrating social media into their investor relations and saw traffic to their site increase from 100 to 4000 per week, and also saw the share price double from $0.06 to $0.12.

With most experts assigning social media “ownership” to PR, is IR the next big milestone for the PR industry? In my own experience over the past four years working with social media, it was initially quite difficult to convince traditional PR teams to invest in social media and I envisage the same journey unfolding with IR teams. So, what lessons can we learn from our social media journey with traditional PR teams? It surely has to be simplifying the entire process:

Clearly outline the objectives to be achieved – drive further traffic to IR information, increase conversation around this information. Ultimately, help increase the reputation of the company and therefore help the share price
Clearly identify the audience – understand the stakeholders that are important to IR, outline the different groups within these and rank their importance
Identify relevant channels – where do we best focus our efforts? Looking at he audiences, where do they spend their time and where are we most likely to be able to deliver our information and meet our objectives
Measurement – we know what the objectives are, who the audience is and the channels we’re going to use, so therefore we should know what we’ll measure to judge success

Sounds simple and straight forward doesn’t it? But what’s not addressed here is the fear factor that we all faced with those initial projects with clients. This is something that we’ll need to address with more authority and vigor with this audience. So, how do we do it? Do we employ the tried and tested methods of crisis communications, do we wheel out the Crisis comms chap? Nope, that’ll just increase the fear factor by 10! So what do you do? You follow a method that’s not readily employed in PR, but one that encourages companies of all sizes invest anything from a few thousand dollars to billons of dollars – you assess the risk, independently if you can.

Risk assessment is something that FTSE 100 companies undertake in most major projects, either externally or internally depending on the size and scope of the projects. Why can’t PR do the same when dealing with IR in social media? Most PR firms have IR, corporate and even legal teams that could help produce such an assessment, so it seems a logical step to take and one that FSTE 100 companies are very comfortable with.

Are Promoted Trends on the way?

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Digiwedo

It wasn’t so long ago that we all welcomed the news around Promoted Tweets, and now after a lot of waiting, it seems that we might be getting another bit of news on the Twitter brand platform. According to a few sources, Twitter is considering selling trending topics as ad space. Apparently, Twitter is even having preliminary conversations with existing partners about this potentially new ad stream for them.

According to the Mashable post on it, “Promoted trends” would let advertising partners create and sponsor a trending term to appear alongside organic terms for a set period of time. Should a user then click on the Promoted trend, they would be redirected to the Twitter search page with the same advertiser’s Promoted Tweet featured at the top.

There’s a couple of interesting points to consider here if this is in fact going to launch and it will function as detailed above. The first is the eyeballs the trending topics actually get – I for one use TweetDeck and don’t actually look at the trending topics that much and tend to rely on watching what’s happening in my own circle. Second is the fact that for a topic to trend, it must generate a lot of mentions – having a “promoted trend” surely doesn’t make sense as it isn’t a “trend” but an ad unit that looks like a trend. Third, the mechanic above drives further traffic to the search page – Twitter is probably one of the only networks where the majority of links drive you to other pages, in this case and the case of the promoted Tweets, they are both focusing on the Twitter Search page.

It’s going to be very interesting watching the Twitter brand platform develop. I for one welcome any move to make the network more brand friendly, but you can’t help but ask the question – why are you focusing on the Twitter search page and not applications, specifically mobile-based applications where many see the big money moving forward?

Is Facebook about to give YouTube a bloody nose?

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Digiwedo

According to ComScore, more Facebook users than ever are watching videos on the site and this has been growing at a fairly healthy rate over the past 12 months. In fact, Facebook could end the year second behind YouTube in terms of reach for online video providers. The data shows that video viewing figures are at around 41.3 million per month as of April 2010 representing huge yearly growth at over 200 per cent. The interesting facet about those numbers, it’s that only counts the video hosted on Facebook itself, not YouTube videos viewed on Facebook……

Mirroring a similar trend to the “social search” post from yesterday, Facebook really is turning out to be the King of Content, but could we soon see them take on the might of YouTube when it comes to video hosting? Hey, it’s possible. The question to ask is this – how can they take on an open platform like YouTube from behind the closed doors of their network? Could we start and see a partially open Facebook where more and more content is placed outside of the confines of your network? With figures like these, I guess this is all going to be (a lot of) food for thought for the guys and gals at Facebook

FarmVille crosses the mobile divide

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Digiwedo

Amongst the various announcements at yesterday’s Apple keynote, one perhaps didn’t get the attention it deserved, and that was the announcement Zynga’s wildly successful FarmVille game is to go mobile with the iPhone 4 being the first platform. But why is this so significant? Well, I can tell you that as a social media and digital communications specialist, people like me have been very interested in working with Zynga to tap into their huge user base.

Casual gaming has always been something that has attracted vast numbers of users, but brands have found it very hard to find relevant and sympathetic ways of engaging with these audiences and have often jarred with the culture of these games. FarmVille on the other hand has two major things going for it – first of, it was built as a Facebook application and it’s where is draws the majority of its user base from and second, it has a huge female user base.

Not so long ago, FarmVille opened up certain advertising elements within the Facebook application and later on the spin off site. But with the mobile device continuing to eat away at traditional desktop-based surfing, the potential advertising revenue starts to flow away to the mobile platforms as well. Which is why, just as OS 4.0 comes into being with the iAd platform, it’s an extremely smart move for the guys at Zynga and perhaps a move that will become much more significant over the coming months.

Who won the digital election?

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Digiwedo

It’s a tough one you know….I don’t think it was any of the political parties, I don’t think it was any of the media and I don’t think it was one specific politician. Following the groundbreaking US election that saw Obama elected, it was only natural for folks this side of the pond to predict something similar to unfold in our election. But alas, we have always been that slightly awkward character (that Hugh Grant tends to play) when compared directly to our American cousins. As Russell Howard jokes, we’re sort of looking over the pond like a slightly envious teenager who’s a bit embarrassed by their dad.

But who did win? Popular opinion, that’s who. And what do I mean by that then? Well, we had every single media outlet trying to tell us who to go for, why the other guy was the “bad guy” and how the country was headed for ruin should we not use our vote carefully. But then, something interesting started to happen……

As the traditional media took their sides and we ended up with selective and sensationalist reporting (one of my favourites was the Daily Mail’s “Nick Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain”) public opinion via social media remained steady and probably the truest representation of what Britain actually thought, for example this little beauty in response to the Nick Clegg story. It became increasingly obvious throughout the campaign that popular opinion was a lot different to the opinion being churned out by the major news outlets, for example the #nickcleggsfault hashtag in response to the increasingly negative stories about him appearing in mainstream media.

As such, Nick Clegg started to emerge a sort of social media rock star, the object of affection for many. Did he win this accolade through his own savvy handling of the social media space? Nope, Britain showed mainstream news that it didn’t want to be told its opinion, it wanted to share it.

UK Electoral Commission finds a friend in Facebook

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Digiwedo

As campaigning for the UK General Election moves into full-swing, the Electoral Commission has a few other things to worry about, namely making sure that the number of registered voters increases. In a move targeted at getting more registered youth voters, the Electoral Commission is working with Facebook to target unregistered voters using the network.

This weekend, users who visit the site will be asked if they have registered to vote. Those that aren’t will be sent to a page linked to the Electoral Commission that lets them enter details online and download a registration form. There was estimated 3.5 million people that were eligible to vote in England and Wales in 2001 that were not registered.

In a quote given to the BBC, Electoral Commission spokesman Clinton Proud said “If you’re not registered, you can’t vote – it’s very simple. By downloading and printing a form through Facebook, users can now make sure that they are able to have their say on election day.” Interestingly, UK citizens cannot register to vote online. By law, a written signature is still required to register.

DIGIWEDO: The man who has no country

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