Moms and Social Marketing 2010

Over the past year I have been observing my wife and the use of social media. It's been amazing what I have found out and her overall behavior around social brand interaction. The Mom Marketing BIGresearch, 2009 did a great job highlighting things I was able to directly observe. Here is a great verification to what I observed.

According to a Retail Advertising and Marketing Association survey conducted by BIGresearch, women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter than average adults. Additionally, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

Mike Gatti, Executive Director for RAMA, suggests that "... retailers who aren't engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat... the web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones."

On a scale of one to five, when asked what types of promotions most influence their purchases, product samples in the store, product samples delivered to home, loyalty cards, and special displays rank as moms' favorites, says the report.

32.9% of Moms prefer department stores and 23.2% head to specialty apparel stores when shopping for clothes for themselves. Shopping for their children's clothes, 30.7% say they head to discount stores, 19.6% say department stores and 17.5% prefer specialty apparel stores. 45% of Moms also most prefer discounters the most for their children's toys and for their own personal health and beauty products.

When it comes to the traditional media preferences, the Food Network and the Discovery Channel are the top cable TV picks, People and Cosmopolitan are the most-preferred magazines, and the daily local and weekly community newspapers are at the top of the list of most-read.


Though individual comments don't constitute a comprehensive study, they are valuable in considering the marketing message. When asked what advertisers on Facebook should do that they aren't currently doing, moms say:
• "Provide exclusive offers (i.e., printable coupons, etc.). Exclusive offers would entice me to respond to the message (not just read/glance at [it]), and I might look them up on Facebook and become a fan."
• "[Be] more interactive. Starbucks is a good example - they just had a Facebook campaign where you could send a coupon for a free Starbucks ice cream to a friend on Facebook."
• "Offer samples."
• "Certificates or coupons for freebies or special discount offers. I always print those and use them."
• "Coupons/discounts for family places [such as] restaurants or coupons for grocery stores."
• "[Be] a little more targeted with online store specials."
• "Just talk to us. Direct us to Twitter or a blog where we can talk back. It's too complicated to carry on a conversation on Facebook. Make it easy for us."
• "I'd like to be able to comment on something they post without being alerted every time someone else makes a post. Sometimes that becomes distracting."
• "Provide something that would actually help me, not just market their product."
• "I like being a fan and following the products/companies that I choose to follow. It makes me feel like I can make the choice of what advertisements I am willing to pay attention to. Advertisers need to move toward fan pages and away from the sidebar ads. Running the occasional contest is always fun!"

For more depth on the report check out http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=786

Chase McMichael
@ChaseUNBOUND

Share this post:

Brand Growth on Facebook Part 2 Year End Addition

“Twenty Ten” is being called the year of social driving ROI and measurement. The year 2009 held a great deal of social experimentation with wins for Dell, BestBuy and Target all pushing exclusive discounts to their Facebook ”fans” or Twitter “followers”. (unlike calling them “buddies” in the day of instant messaging). This is UNBOUND’s 2nd series of Brand Growth on Facebook year end addition. For any marketer the truth be told that your customers online, 20% of the clickers on the internet make up 80% of the buyers. These numbers have been kicked around for some time. In a recent Forester article saying “Social Marketing will go from ‘cool’ in 2009 to ‘strategic’ in 2010” and I fully agree.

Now with social network, the ability to instantaneous broadcast to your “friends” on what you fan or tweeting out a recent discovered discount or good experience with a retailer is most likely the biggest game changer for marketers to not only harness but better understand their consumers over all passion points and product preferences. In this blog post we have compiled the Top Fan page categories based on what we call Top Brands. Top Brands are those that have links to a known brand or the actual brand themselves maintain. There are over 1.4 Million fan pages on Facebook making a very long tail where in this post we have segmented out the top 100,000 and organized them to see how the leaders in their categories are mastering the social graph. For their competitors, 2010 will be a game of catch up inserting themselves into the Social Conversation. Brands start taking advantage of social graphs. If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

On Facebook fan pages can be set with a type such as:


In the past year Facebook has greatly diversified brand sub types adding in Fashion, Other Business, Sports / Athletics. UNBOUND has done an extensive amount of cleaning the data since fan pages are user generated. We will show the “Other” category we created to assist in organizing consumer affinities.


All major brands have an Industry Type SIC Code and we have also assigned SIC codes to fan pages to enable vertical industry segmentation. From the top listings it's now each to see what industry types dominates Facebook.





Here we have highlighted the Top Ten winners for specific categories.
Games is the smallest category, however, has some of the largest fanning on Facebook.


Tapping into consumers' entertainment preferences such as TV shows and their relation to other products, services provides a brand the most comprehensive foundation for performing large scale consumer affinity analysis. By ranking these affinities aligned with the categories we reviewed here creates an in-depth consumer insight of your community as it grows.






Brand now have the ability to not only see the direct consumer reach (friend of friend) their fan base has but also the collective top affinities organized to build ultra high viral campaigns using Social Network Intelligence. (If you guessed the above affinity map links with a female consumer product you would be right)

Consumers have created over a million Facebook fan pages since Facebook opened up the fan page creation. Below is just a sample of what we call miss typed fan pages whereby the Fan page Admin selected a type. UNBOUND has taken great care in typing these into the “Other” category to produce clean affinity maps. However, this information is great value for many marketers using these Other types.


The amazing aspect of analyzing UGC Fan pages is seeing that a large set of consumers are sleep deprived, want more leisure time and desire laughter in their life.



In conclusion…… well maybe there’s not a conclusion just a big wake up call for the brands that have yet to realize social is not just some check box or insertion order but a viable way to tip the balance of getting to the hearts and minds of loyal customers making them super fans or brand beacons.



Twenty Ten will be the year brands demand better social analysis and measurement as more dollars are shifted in this not so “New Media” channel. Brands have to understand their social graphs, who are their top rank consumers, who have blogs, who is on twitter and how many of their customers are on what social networks to start maximizing their social asset.

Callan Green Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies did a great job highlighting some examples that will inspire you.

Chase McMichael @ChaseUNBOUND

Share this post: