So what exactly is the difference between how we use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, et al? Like most everything in life, it’s easiest when you think in terms of pee. [Vanished Omen via PRSD via EpicPonyz]More »
Anyone who thought that social media was going to usher in a utopian era of communication without borders is going to have their faith badly shaken by a new study from Cornell University. On Twitter, it seems, there are already at least two walled-off nations: happy people and unhappy people.
And never the twain shall tweet.
The Cornell study, spotted by New Scientist magazine, tracked 102,000 Twitter users and analyzed the 129 million tweets they sent and received during a six-month period. It examined the words they used using what the authors call “standard techniques from psychology” to rate their sense of self-fulfillment — an important measure, in the burgeoning field of happiness studies, known as subjective well-being or SWB. People with a high SWB were significantly less likely to send or receive tweets from someone with a low SWB, and the same was true in reverse.
In other words, the happy people have formed little Happy Twitter clubs. Meanwhile misery loves company in social media — as much as, if not more than, in real life.
“Beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” can be assortative in a social network,” writes the study’s lead author, Johan Bollen. But he admits that even he doesn’t know why that should be the case.
So why is it so? Is it simply human nature, or a function peculiar to short-form virtual communication?
The answer depends on who you ask. Users on the “happy” side of the SWB equation will probably tell you they meant to respond to that depressive tweet from their Debbie Downer friend, but it was such a bummer they couldn’t be bothered. Unhappy tweeters will grumble about the insufferably peppy quality of tweets from those shiny cheerleaders over in the happy corner.
If there are any Twitter API developers looking for a Nobel Prize-worthy challenge, now would be the time to devise an app that could bring the two factions together in a state of semi-contentedness.
More About: hapiness, Happy, study, twitter, unhappy
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If this year’s SXSWi conference is any indication, the foremost digital marketing trends of 2011 will be central to one theme: user presence.
Too often, businesses over-engineer their marketing efforts in an attempt to capture the attention of their audiences’ minds and wallets. But audiences are smart, and they’re immune to these efforts.
We no longer seek out information — we expect information to be seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives. Picking up on that trend, small businesses plan to increase spending on inbound marketing in 2011, according to recent reports. These efforts will include established initiatives such as Facebook campaigns and location-based advertising, but businesses will also experiment with a handful of new (and not so new) strategies. Here are five digital marketing trends to watch as the year unfolds.
Group messaging has undoubtedly become this year’s location-based service. The clear front-runners are Beluga and GroupMe, both of which offer users a way to communicate in small, personalized groups of friends. So, how does this tie into marketing strategies?
What more can you ask for as a business than to have groups of customers already populated and organized by interest, age and location? The data that these groups provide is invaluable.
Much like location-based marketing campaigns in 2010, marketers will be anxious to find ways to integrate messaging and purchase points into groups. As Beluga co-founder Lucy Zhang explained on a SXSWi panel this past weekend, the primary use case for group messaging this winter has been to organize ski trips. Imagine the marketability of those groups looking for ski gear, lodging and restaurants.
Somewhere along the way, professional networks have begun to exist upon a foundation of trivial metrics. Our everyday lives have become inundated by these reputation engines: mayorships on Foursquare, the velocity of one’s HurricaneParty, number of followers on Twitter, etc.
Several recent companies such as BranchOut, Honestly.com (formerly Unvarnished) and Hashable, have attempted to bridge the gap between real-world reputation and online marks, but it is unclear whether or not these companies will successfully convey the appropriate balance.
Marketers would be wise to turn to a keen eye toward these networks because they represent the base of influence, both online and offline. Whether or not the algorithms are perfect, each social network exists to harness the power of relationships forged in real life — and serves as a prime audience for marketing.
Ok, so QR codes really aren’t new. Businesses have been generating QR codes for marketing purposes for several years now. But I have a confession to make — I simply do not understand the success of QR codes.
The technology itself is rather trivial and has been around for more than a decade, even though QR codes penetrated the mainstream market pretty recently. For example, on a recent shopping trip to Sephora, I noticed the use of QR codes to collect additional information about products around the store. Considering I am admittedly secluded within the tech industry, I was anxious to know just how successful a somewhat “nerdy” marketing gimmick could be on the average, everyday consumer. So, I quickly asked a nearby sales clerk, “How many shoppers do you generally see scanning your QR codes each day?” Her response: “What is a QR code?”
Now, it’s obviously not fair to judge an entire strategy on a single participant, but this is where my own confusion lies. QR codes are everywhere. And yet, it’s as though consumers simply decided not to question them. Has this been your experience?
Regardless of how many scans a QR code will garner, it certainly appears that we will see an increasing use of them in 2011.
A few months ago, a startup received more than 10,000 signups within two days, without ever disclosing what it even does. And thanks to LaunchRock, companies can now create a no-fuss landing page for their business in a matter of minutes, thus initiating the single-most meta business model I have seen this year. These companies collect user contact information, promising access to their beta if they agree to publicize their own sign-up.
Which begs the question, how much information is really necessary to market to an audience? Not much it seems.
Users are hungry to be early adopters. Even mainstream users are becoming increasingly savvy to the newest thing -– tech is sexy again, and smart marketers know this. In 2011, I expect to see similar efforts that reflect this startups for startups meme. Everyone wants a piece of the startup pie and schemes like Launchrock are certainly a great way to gain attention and gather data.
Quora, a Q&A site launched in 2009, has mostly attracted the attention of the technology and media industries, but it will likely inspire mainstream marketers soon. The site, along with some of its competitors, has become a useful marketing tool. The Q&A space is quickly heating up, with influential organizations like TED and Facebook getting into the space.
Q&A sites provide a platform where users can engage in simple dialogue pertaining to any question — businesses have the ability to seed questions, interject into negative discussions, establish credibility and respond to competitor questions.
Much like a company blog that is built to drive conversation around a particular brand and industry, businesses will continue to find avenues to market to targeted audiences, such as those found within each Quora topic.
Marketing strategy in 2011 evolves directly from the location-based marketing of 2010. We have found that messages are most successfully communicated to audiences that have already coalesced around common bonds.
What do you think? Will you be more likely to engage with brands that market through the aforementioned channels?
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The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, e-mail, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Learn more.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Stephan Geyer, saxarocks
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Score one for social media.
A new study has shown it’s not how much you spend on advertising that gets you more favorable mentions on Twitter, it’s how creative you are when putting your brand out there.
The study, released by search marketing agency Covario is a survey of 81 of the world’s largest advertisers as ranked by Advertising Age magazine, and it found that a correlation between money spent and positive opinion did not hold true when extended to all forms of advertising.
Those included advertising in digital and offline, television, radio, print and out-of-home ad campaigns.
The study also found “zero statistical correlation” between a company’s ad expenditures, whether just digital or in total, and its brand sentiment, as reflected by positive Twitter references.
But Covario did find a direct correlation to the amount a brand spent on digital advertising and the amount it is discussed on Twitter, which showed that consumers don’t react to money poured into more traditional advertising, but they do to ads via social media.
Because of how fast word spreads on the microblogging service, Covario CMO Craig Macdonald said Twitter is an ideal barometer for how and where companies are getting the most attention.
“We figured Twitter would be a great place to see if they are getting some return on that investment,” Macdonald told me. “Those brands that spend more should have more brand recognition and more conversation about their products and brands.”
Covario collected the data through its new software reporting platform, Social Media Insight, which it built last year for client Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The company then used the platform to measure brand popularity by plugging in search-marketing keywords, then analyzing the sentiment of a brand’s terms across social media sites.
Based on the comments about a brand, Covario then created a score to rank what kind of bang for its buck a company was getting — and where.
“[We saw] that consumers would react positively to brand presence. That they would talk confidently and positively about the brands they heard about the most and saw the most,” said Macdonald.
So who got the most (or least) love across the brands studied?
Well, among the best-loved brands on Twitter that Covario studied were Kohl’s Department Store, which scored a 9.2 (10 being the highest possible score, -10 being the lowest), followed by Berkshire Hathaway (9.0), Coca-Cola (7.3), Hershey’s Chocolate (7.3), Qwest (7.1), and The Walt Disney Co. (5.6).
When measured by industry, brands in the telecommunications industry scored lowest (-0.59 cumulatively) no matter how or where they advertised. Despite it having one of the largest advertising budgets out there, nobody is fond of the phone company.
Companies: ad age magazine, American Express, Berkshire Hathaway, Campbell’s Soup, Coca-Cola, Covario, General Mills, Hershey’s Chocolate, Kohl’s Department Store, Lowes, Macy’s, Mattel, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Qwest, Sears, Sony Entertainment, The Walt Disney Co, Twitter, Unilever
People: craig macdonald
When Twitter‘s platform lead Ryan Sarver sent out a missive to developers last week telling them to stop building Twitter clients, he argued that users should rely on the “official” Twitter apps. Sarver maintained that, indeed, most users were already doing so: “According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.”
That assertion caught the attention of Sysomos, as Twitter’s data seemed inconsistent with some of the analysis that the social media analytics company has done of the Twitter ecosystem.
So Sysomos took a sample of 25 million tweets from Friday March 11. That data shows that 42% of tweets were made by unofficial apps – more than four times the figures that Twitter claims.
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Sysomos notes that among these unofficial apps, the most popular are TweetDeck, UberSocial and Echofon, all owned by UberMedia, a company that ran into trouble with Twitter last month when two of its apps, UberTwitter and Twidroyd were suspended.
Despite the strong showing of the UberMedia clients here, it’s worth pointing out that these stats put the popular TweetDeck at just 5.5% of total tweets, down from 19.9% in its June 2009 report.
Sysomos says that the “disconnect” between its analysis and Twitter’s claims probably comes from the way in which these figures were calculated. Sysomos has presented the client usage here based on the total number of tweets on March 11. Twitter’s numbers comes from the total number of users.
It may be that the users who are on Twitter’s official apps aren’t as active as those who are using the unofficial ones. That’s not terribly surprising considering that these apps tend to offer more features than you can find via Twitter’s website – they offer analytics, better notifications, and integration with other social media services, for example.
Even though the Sysmos analysis shows that there is still strong usage of unofficial Twitter apps, that number may be steadily on the decline. The June 2009 study found that 55% of tweets were made on these apps, while Friday’s figures now put unofficial app usage at 42%. As Twitter improves its own mobile and web offerings, this trend will continue, helped on by what seems to be a strong stance from Twitter that it will be so.