This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week: SMBs and Social Media Marketing: Prepping up for 2012 Part One: Growth Projections, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing Part Two: Social Media Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Google+

From the Pros: 30 Social Media Predictions for 2012. Top 5 Trends: Search & Social Media Marketing in 2012. Social Business: Why Social Media Doesn’t Mean Business. Study: Emerging Markets Tops in Social Media Activity. WalmartLabs: Even Walmart Is Snapping Up Social Media Companies. Demoted: Google Chrome Penalized for Violating Quality Guidelines. Marketing Tips: 17 Silly Missed Lead Generation Opportunities. IBD Report: Google CEO Larry Page Named Boss of the Year. Yahoo’s New CEO: We Will Focus on Both Content and Technology. Survey Report: Apple and Google Come Out On Top In 2012 Predictions.

Video of the Week How Social Media is Helping Local Businesses Grow. Chop Chop owner David Terry says when you run your own business it’s not always easy to chat and talk with every customer, but social media provides you that opportunity.

Position² Brand Monitor™ is Now Free to use! Social Media Monitoring Just Got a Whole Lot Easier With Brand Monitor™, you can: Monitor social media conversations in real-time Track brands across social media, blogs, news, discussion forums, video and photo sharing sites Get detailed analytics and in-depth reports on the entire process Sign Up for Position² Brand Monitor™!

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In the third and final installment of the ‘Three Major Demographics for Online Marketers’ series, the Position² research team looked at the importance of marketing to women and how brands can benefit from one of the largest audiences online. Women, who make up for the majority of users on many popular social networking channels, have established a strong presence on the social web. Snippets from a recent study by ComScore show that:

• The average time spent online by women is 24.8 hours, compared to men who spend approximately 22.9 hours.
• In April 2010, women accounted for 16.3% of the average time spent on various social networks, as against the 11.7% average time spent by men.
• Although the number of visits to retail websites were almost the same for men as they were for women, the latter reportedly spent more time actually browsing through these websites.

One of the reasons why we singled out women as one of the key demographics for digital marketers is because of the purchasing power they yield. For instance, sites like Zappos, Groupon (77% female customers), Gilt Groupe (70% women shoppers), Etsy, and Diapers have women as their biggest customers. With the digital space gradually witnessing an increase in female visitors, it was no surprise when social networking newbie, Google+, saw 33% of its traffic driven by women (as of July 14, 2011), a figure that is inching upwards. For brands investing millions of dollars in digital, especially social media marketing, data such as this is proof enough that the female audience needs to have campaigns and marketing strategies that specifically target it. Here are some very convincing statistics that will highlight why online marketers need to leverage girl power:

• 42% million women in the US routinely participate in social media.
• A new study conducted by Edison Research and Arbitron, The Social Habit 2011, shows that women account for 52% and 54% of the Facebook and Twitter users respectively.
• A demographic analysis conducted in April 2011, for the European market, indicates that females spent significantly more time (5.7 hours) on social networks than males (4.1 hours) across all age groups.
• The COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, revealed that women, on an average, have 8% more Facebook friends than men.

For online marketers looking to reach women, the possibilities are endless. However, before crowding the digital space with gender specific campaigns and marketing messages, it is important for brands to understand: how do women spend their time online and what do they want from the web?

• The Social Expressionistas, Alpha Trendsetters and Shopsessives:

A study by AOL and Bovitz Research Group broadly categorizes web-savvy women into these distinct behavioral groups.

• Social Expressionistas: These community creators are passionate about spreading the word online and are highly active on social networking sites.



• Alpha Trendsetters: Take their social lives and careers seriously and are very brand conscious. Our recommendation? The perfect target market for markers of luxury brands that aim their products at women, such as Estee Lauder.
• Shopsessives: Believe they are experts in all areas ranging from fashion to health and are shopping online across all product categories. This group highly influences the shopping decisions of their family and friends.

• The Discount Seekers:

A study by ChiefMarketer shows that 47% women look for coupons and promotions online; why is that not surprising? The female demographic, which comprises of homemakers, mothers, wives etc, is also empowered financially, with more and more women taking on the role of the breadwinner. However, the coupon searching trait is not so much about saving money, as it is about women who constantly look out for something that intrigues them through the convenience of social media sites. Here’s something interesting; a recent Groupon study found that it was attracting the young, single, educated, female crowd with cash to spend. For advertisers and online marketers, this target group is a goldmine.



• The Twitterians:

Twitter, which was largely believed to be used by men, has a growing female user base. According to bloggers Dan Zarella and Darmesh Shaw’s analyses, women follow more people, tweet more, and have more followers on an average than men.

Be it discount seekers, coupon collectors or fashion conscious women, the key to getting the most out of your social media marketing campaign is knowing where your target market is most active and what are the popular trends dictating their online activities. In order to get clarity on your market type (in this case, women) we recommend using social media monitoring tools such as Brand Monitor for complete understanding of your target demographic.

Why Marketers Should Reach Moms

With women being the most frequent users of social media, it is not surprising to learn that moms are heavily into social networking. One of the brands to understand this way before the others could catch up is Huggies. The baby products maker jumped onto the social media bandwagon back in 2009, by launching the Circle of Moms social site (also a Facebook page). The webpage, which includes an expert advice column, a mom-to-mom forum with relevant tips, age specific diaper information etc, was a huge hit with moms. That was a few years back; are mothers just as important an audience for online marketers today as they were then? Some reasons why we think marketers should reach moms online:

• According to the Moms And Media: 2011 report, a whopping 62% of mothers have a Facebook profile page, while 70% of social networking moms are posting status updates online. This makes mommy “status updaters” an increasingly important part of the continuum of marketing communications.
• Many brands perceive social-savvy moms as an important demographic because they not just share content, but also listen.
• When compared to dads, moms are 40% more likely to follow a brand on social media channels.
• Moms are still primary budgeters and spenders in the household, which makes them VIPs to marketers.

That was the ‘why’ of reaching mothers in the digital space; Let us now look at the ‘how to‘, the understanding of which comes naturally to brands that know precisely what the moms are doing and what they expect from online marketers.

• Identify the power moms: These women communicate with their families and friends through various social networking channels as well as other mom-specific social networks. They are online paying bills, planning family vacations and downloading coupons.
• Design Informative Ads: According to an About.com survey featured in eMarketer, 51% of moms said “ads that provide detailed information about how I can use a product” grab their attention. For instance, YoCrunch Yogurt’s integrated social media campaign that targets mothers also features a dedicated discussion space on the brand’s redesigned Facebook page that invites moms seeking product related information to chat with each other and with the brand.
• Tell a Story: Moms like stories, and social media provides the perfect platform for brands to disguise their marketing messages in the form of interesting stories. This approach, we believe, is much better than simply ’selling’ something online.
• Engagement is the Answer: Marketing messages without focus on engagement are like one way traffic. Mothers today expect a dialogue with the brand online; the key here is to encourage your customers for their opinions, complaints and appreciations just the way P&G is planning to do with its ‘Life Well Lived’ campaign on BlogHer.

Marketing to Women: Popular Myths

Whether it is moms or women in general, the stereotypical image about this gender can sometimes lead to the creation of myths that could result in less-than-perfect marketing messages. Here’s a compilation of some typical myths on how to supposedly market to female customers online:

• Myth#1: Women are technology shy: The fact? More women own smartphones than men and are more reliant and comfortable with technology than they were a few years ago. According to recent studies, 75% of women disagreed with the statement “men are more comfortable with tech than women”.
• Myth#2: All women are moms: Most marketers simply assume that all women are moms. Designing online or offline campaigns based on this assumption may not yield the desired results. Why? Because they are not targeting the specific demographic. As quoted by the She-conomy blog “All moms are women, but not all women are moms.“
• Myth#3: Women only buy the girly stuff: Going by this belief means missing out on a huge customer base. The female customer’s shopping list in current times comprises of more than just lipstick and high-heels. According to the newly released “What Women Want From the Web Report,” Summer 2010, by Unicast, while women do look for beauty and fashion related products online, around 48% are researching travel destinations, and 59% are browsing for gaming and entertainment products. Our take on this? Women have moved beyond the ‘I love pink and frilly’ phase.
• Myth#4: It’s all about emotions: While it is true that women are drawn to online campaigns that attempt to make an emotional connection, there’s a flipside to overusing the ‘emotion card’. When Hoover vacuums launched their ‘Clean Freaks Rejoice‘ campaign on YouTube, the company’s aim was to emotionally connect with women who were usually tasked with the ‘after party’ cleaning up. However, the brand’s display of women as ‘neurotic’ and ‘anxious’ did not go down well with the female demographic.

Conclusion

Although there is a significant amount of stereotyping that occurs around women’s interests, especially assumptions that restrict women’s interests to fashion, cooking or childcare, this appears to be gradually changing. The modern marketer understands that female customers are no longer technology shy and are among the biggest buyers of smartphones and other gadgets. Online marketers targeting tech-savvy women should consider designing more apps that cater to the lifestyles of today’s female shoppers.

While there are several myths on how to market to women online, more and more marketers are broadening their horizons and are bold enough to design social media campaigns which, although are gender specific, are unconventional in several ways. Social media campaigns these days are detailed, interactive and seek to engage the specific target audience, who in this case, are women. Women, especially mothers, are interested in having on-going relationships with brands they can trust and ones that understand their needs. It is true that moms make up for a huge demographic online; however, brands need to keep in mind the fact that simply churning out mom-specific campaigns could mean missing out on other female customers, who may not be necessarily mothers, but nevertheless have equal maturity and financial stability. We believe that the modern woman is not your typical customer and most often than not prompts brands to put their thinking caps on; but what we also know is that coupon collecting, the inclination to shop online, and brand loyalty are behavioral traits that have been typical of the female demographic and will continue to be an integral part of online marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, what we are also eager to see is if the female demographic accepts Google+ with the same enthusiasm as they have for Facebook or Twitter. If Google+’s current popularity with the fairer sex continues, this could be a viable platform for online marketers looking to target women.

With this we conclude our three part series on the most important demographics online. Although the three demographics we mentioned, i.e. youth, baby boomers and women, make up for your typical customer base online, these three big subgroups have unique and specific needs and expectations from brands. Take a look at our previous posts on Marketing to the YouTube Generation and Marketing to Baby Boomers for more information.

• The Three Major Demographics for Online Marketers (Part 2): Marketing to Baby Boomers (2)
• The Enterprise Social Media Command Center: Processes (1)
• Integrating Social Media Monitoring with Business Functions: Marketing (2)

We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Enhanced Daily Alerts, Reports and other Functionality Improvements

• Brand Monitor™ now has a new “Deep Dive” section under “Reports” which gives you a more detailed media breakup for each search bucket along with sentiment analysis. In phase two of our “Deep Dive” release, we will add advanced filtering functionality here.
• Daily email alerts will contain data with a “high relevance score”, which means more focused and useful data into your inbox.
• You can now set a default relevance score for each search topic.
• Brand Monitor now has a new Tag Cloud for each search topic, with new filters for discovering keywords for each media type.

Geographic and Demographic Reach

You can now discover the geographic and demographic reach of each search topic, via the dashboard and report pages.

The geographic breakup will show you the number of posts accumulated from each country. The demographic breakup has gender and age group graphs.

• The geographic data is further broken into individual states in USA.
• Demographics include an industry breakup for each gender.

In phase two, we’ll be adding in-depth state-wise geographic segregation for more countries and optimizing our charts.

LinkedIn Integration

Similar to Facebook integration now you can manage your LinkedIn profile via Brand Monitor™.

After adding your LinkedIn account you can see your connections’ status messages, application updates, profile changes, group activities and Q&A posts.

• Comment or like status messages
• Sentiment analysis on status message
• Use filters to view specific type of LinkedIn network updates: status message, connection, application, profile update, group activities or Q&A posts.

Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!]

• Advanced LinkedIn and Facebook Integration
• Advanced Geographic and Demographic reports

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Post Relevance

Brand Monitor™ is now powered by an enhanced relvance scoring engine, that you can control. Available under “Filters”, you can choose varying levels of relevance; this changes the stream of posts accordingly.


We do this by giving each post a “score” for relevance when compared to a search keyword. By default, “High Relevance” is selected, and posts with “Low” or “Medium” relevance scores are not shown.

If you don’t see too many posts in the stream for a particular keyword, try changing the relevance filter to “Medium” or “Low”.

Salesforce Integration

See a potential lead talking about your product or service? Perhaps a competitor? You can now send this person’s contact information to Salesforce directly via Brand Monitor™.


It takes about 5 minutes of setting up – we need to integrate your “Organization ID” from Salesforce into Brand Monitor™, and you can choose which fields you want to capture and send to Salesforce.

Once set up, every post will have a “Salesforce” tab, from where you can submit leads. In the near future, we’ll automatically populate as many of the fields as possible.

Facebook Integration

Brand Monitor™ will shortly introduce an integrated Facebook client. You can manage your Facebook accounts, Facebook pages and interact with your fan base. Managing your company’s Facebook presence is easier, quicker and more effective.

You can manage multiple Facebook accounts and pages, use the built-in URL shorterner (bit.ly), schedule multiple status messages for future publishing, update status messages, add comments and also “Like” posts.

Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!]

• More Facebook Integration Features
• LinkedIn Integration
• Geography and Demographic Reports

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Integrated Twitter Client

You can now tweet, reply, retweet, follow and unfollow right from the Brand Monitor™ interface! Sharing posts and creating new conversations is now easier and more convenient.

• Multiple Twitter Accounts!: You can add all your Twitter accounts into Brand Monitor™. Each Twitter account added gets a separate search bucket with graphs that show volume, sentiment, top influencers and “most talked about” topics.
  
  
• Never miss a single tweet: All tweets are tracked in one place and tagged with sentiment and influencer scores, even when you are not logged in!
• Clearly demarcated read and unread tweets help keep the information stream manageable – you can easily identiy new tweets, and the system works better than your exising Twitter client as it works 24/7 and not just when you are logged in.

More Customization for Email Alerts

You now have more control over your email alerts – you can choose which search buckets you want to get emails for, and you see the top posts for the day in your alerts.



Aggregation of Similar Posts

Too many posts on the same topic clogging up your information stream? Not any more! Brand Monitor™ identifies duplicate posts and tags them as one – you can expand the post to see duplicate entries.



We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Twitter Influencer Analysis and Display

Now, next to each tweet, you will see an “Influencer Score” (out of 100) that our algorithm has rated for the author. Also, if you hover over the twitter author’s username, you get to see more information about the author: Full Name, Influencer Score, Bio, Location, Website, Total Tweets, Followers and Following.

• How do we arrive at an Influencer Score?
  
  We identify 10 key sets of information on each Twitter author, and apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final score. The final score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging his/her audience and how large the impact of their opinion is.
• New Tweet Display
  
  We have redesigned the way a tweet is displayed, for a closer resemblance to how it looks on Twitter.

Post Title and Summary Redesigned, Media Logos Added

Earlier, our system used to remove special characters from a post title; this would make “AT&T” look like “ATT”. Posts now display special characters, and summaries end in a complete sentence.

• Media Logos
  
  Based on the media source, each post has a logo associated to it. This enables you to quickly identify the source of a post. These logos are also in the “Filter” section for media.

Preview Search Bucket Results



While creating a search bucket you now have the option to preview a sample set of results.

This ensures that your search is getting the desired results before you actually submit it, saving you time and effort.

Date Range for Comparison Reports



You now have the option to compare data based on a time range in the comparison report section.

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. If you’d like to try out Brand Monitor™, let us know!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)

If you have been following my posts, you would know that  last time I spoke on Social Media Monitoring and its importance. In this post I will be talking about the importance of measuring social media campaign to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

Social Media should be used in a well planned way around your Objectives or Product. The key things which are cyclic in a well structured Social Media Strategy are:

1. Planning in advance
2. Designing your path
3. Execution
4. Measurement and review

Social Media Campaigns take time to show tangible results.  One should have some clarity in what needs to be done. Measure the engagement and plan your next step accordingly.

Measuring Social media is not just about the traffic or conversions that you get. Make sure you measure the conversations, search, and the influencers. Later measure the provoking level of the involvement, interaction and influence your campaign creates with consumers. To get a full picture make sure you put together all the factors of monitoring and measuring your campaign along with web site analytics.

We have Free and Paid tools to monitor these.  A tool like Radian6 might give you influencer insight where as a tool like Sysomos can help you in sentiment analysis. Even free tools like Socialmention, Samepoint help in evaluating your efforts.

Success or failure in Social Media depends on the engagement level that you are able to create and better understanding of your efforts.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

• Social Media Monitoring ROI: Metrics For Measurement (1)
• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)

Link building is a process of increasing the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines.

There are three primary reasons to build links;

1. Direct Click-Through Traffic
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and
3. Help save advertising costs

The goal of most search engine optimization and social media marketing campaigns is to build traffic and higher rankings. Link building can be done in many ways, it is difficult and time intensive but when done properly it is worth the effort.

Most effective ways of link building:

1. News and Article Syndication
2. Directories & Social Bookmarking
3. Q&A sites
4. Forums and discussion centers.
5. Blogs and blog commenting.

There are many other ways of increasing links like Advertisements, Giveaways and Conferences & Social Interactions. All these processes take time and can lead to spam if not done properly. Link dropping has to be done carefully in a relevant, good site and should have content similar to your site.

Contributed by Ganesh Vel

• The Three Major Demographics for Online Marketers (Part 3): The Importance of Marketing to Women (2)
• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)

YouTube has been the revolution in the Internet for sharing videos covering different topics. There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minute on YouTube making it the second largest search engine in the World. It has become vital for business to gain market value over the Internet and YouTube has the right mix with its varied topics.

YouTube has a reputation of being the place to look for funny videos. It is the second place to go after probably ‘Googling’ it. Most videos generate a one-time audience response, as very few people look for the same video again. Since YouTube plays such an important in search results and ranking, it cannot be overlooked. To reach out to your audience and to keep them coming back to view the videos again, here are some rules to be followed :

1. Creation of a channel specific to the videos
2. The video has to be optimized with the desired keywords and involving in the community discussions is vital
3. It is also essential to upload new videos frequently
4. It important to keep in mind while creating the videos that viewer would come back to view the videos only if the videos are informative, original and interesting
5. Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization
6. Embed the videos in the blog. This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience

YouTube has become feature rich with its recent launch of trending topics, to provide more real time value and ease of use for the user in finding information on trending topics. This new addition has made YouTube all the more attractive making it vital for business to get a share of voice in the online market as the volume of search in YouTube is growing at an increasing pace.

Contributed by Vishnuram Muthukumarasamy

• SMB 2012 Marketing, Top 5 Online Trends This Year & much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Twitter Business Guide, Google+ Business Profile and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• The Three Major Demographics for Online Marketers (Part 3): The Importance of Marketing to Women (2)

Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

Listen: It is very important to “listen” to what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry as a whole. People and their opinions influence your customers. Watch out for any complaints against you or your competitors, as it is the best opportunity to showcase your customer service to them and show that you care and value customers.

Potential customers also look for others opinions before they make the purchase decision.

Participate: It not about just listening, you need to get engaged and converse with people. If you respond timely to any of the questions it reassures the faith in your brand among the people. Even if your brand is not talked about its essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Make a plan and start conversation at relevant places and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Respond: When you are monitoring the conversations you know the happenings and can implement relevant responses. A proper response goes a long way in spreading the good about your brand in these times of the ripple effect like Twitter.

Tools: There are many paid and free tools to keep a tab on the conversations. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Backtype.

There are paid tools, which help in monitoring and analyzing the brand such as Brand Monitor, radian6, Collective intellect, TechrigySM2 to name a few.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

• SMM = Social Media Measurement (2)
• The Three Major Demographics for Online Marketers (Part 3): The Importance of Marketing to Women (2)
• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)