Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.

I got this off of Ad Age today and added in a few things.
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.

There is going to be a play here for using consumers presence with Instant Messaging and the use of realtime as well .

Everyone has a social graph. In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the "destination web" towards a "social web" whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook's new "reconnect with" feature is one implementation of social graph data.

The social graph needs two kinds of tool to work. At the service end, it needs algorithms -- the formula that use your graph to determine what information and connections you value most, which allows services to predict what information you're going to like (including, of course, which products and marketing communications you'll appreciate). At the user end, it needs filters -- the ability to group people and information more effectively to get the most out of a network. The effectiveness of both algorithms and filters are improving rapidly, and these will be a big factor in the continued evolution of social media.

In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks. There's increasing evidence that the ROI of social media is definitely worth the effort.

In my next post will talk to some of the above approaches in Social Brand Growth Part II.

2010 social intelligence and e-mail marketing trends

2010 looks to be a big year for marketing plan integrating social intelligence to drive lead generation and rethinking their spend on how to leverage social targeting and email marketing combination.

Karen J. Bannan “Looking ahead: 2010 e-mail marketing trends” references leader StrongMail in the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” indicates 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in email marketing and social media budgets in the New Year. Of the 1,000 global business leaders found that the positive outlook is supported by 50% of polled businesses that expect their customers to spend more in 2010, and nearly a quarter more that expect them to spend the same. Only 8% of businesses expect their customers to spend less.
Email and social media marketing are the two leading areas of investment at 69% and 59% respectively.

(Thanks for the blug Kristin)

They will do so using several strategies, said Kristin Hersant, StrongMail’s director of corporate marketing. “We see marketers getting a lot more sophisticated, leveraging the viral aspect of the Web,” she said. “For example, using targeted segmentation to create a referral program with their top influencers, who they know are most active with their brand.”

Hersant said tools are finally coming to the market that will help marketers tease out the most active users on their lists by examining engagement metrics. Companies such as UNBOUND Technologies . can scrub those lists to determine which recipients are active in the social networking world and the networks they are on.

Among their goals, marketers reported a desire to increase relevancy by adopting segmentation and targeting, cited by 46% of respondents.

With social media marketing a clear focus for businesses, Respondents identified the top three benefits of social media marketing as:
• Awareness building (64%)
• Customer loyalty and retention (49%)
• Expanded reach (46%)
Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations at StrongMail, notes that “… this survey reveals a strong focus on high ROI channels like email and emerging ones like social media… (with) an unprecedented number of companies look to integrate email and social media in 2010…”

Reported survey highlights include:

• 89% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2010


• 50% of businesses expect customers to spend more; 23% to spend about the same; 8% to spend less


• 69% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 59% social media; 42% search


• 69% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2010


• 64% of businesses identify increasing awareness as the primary value for social media

The key here is you need to have a clear understanding of your consumers’ passion points, where they are interacting and your possible influencers. 2010 is a big year for Social Intelligence and Social Consumer Insight making email the quick hit for marketers in the new year.

Chase McMichael

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Incorporate Social Network Intelligence in your Marketing Strategy and Win!

Posting the presentation at AdTech NY 09:
Social networks are about conversations. Effective social marketing is about having those conversations with the right people. At this session UNBOUND Technologies Chase McMichael and Room 214’s James Clark will demonstrate a case history of the Travel Channel to show how they used Social Network Intelligence to identify, target, and analyze customers across the social graph and then tapped into their passion points. Hear how to create and nurture highly targeted marketing conversations that impact not just individuals, but influence entire online communities.

Results in 6 Months

* Social Media Traffic Drivers

o Facebook Top 10 Referring Source

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! Users

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! App Users

o 350,000 Uniques to “I Have The Bug”

o 81,000 Hungry for More App Users

o Over 40,000 online conversations about Travel Channel

o 80% Positive Sentiment

o 150 – 1,500 Live Chat Participants

Ad Tech UNBOUND Room214 11 2 09

View more presentations from Chase McMichael.

Interested in getting results like this? Contact us and will show you at sales@unboundtech.com or call 888 377 1264

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Social Brand Growth: Part 1

I have worked up a 3 part series on Social Brand Growth. Enabling database marketing companies the ability to truly appeal to the customers with relevance and communicate with your audience through social intelligence.


Social networks have changed the dynamic between businesses and consumers from two-dimensional to multi-dimensional. This shift occurred because social networks have allowed brands to become active listeners and participants in broader conversations that consumers with common affinities.



Going beyond antiquated marketing campaigns to create true, meaningful social interactions with consumers is not an easy task. Regardless of whether companies decide to outsource their social network efforts or manage those efforts in-house, UNBOUND Technologies' SNI (Social Network Intelligence) technology platform is a fundamental step that will enable data base marketing companies, email service providers and any marketing or sales organization to take full advantage of these rapidly emerging opportunities in social media.


The Growth of Social Networks

As most already know, a social networking friend is anyone who associates with another user. A friend can be a close acquaintance or a stranger, with whom the user shares some affinity, including jobs, music, movies, television or fashion. Social networks have experienced significant growth in recent years. 48 percent of American adults have either a MySpace or Facebook page. (1) 16 percent of these adults update their page at least once a day. (2) 74 percent of online users from 18 to 34 years of age have a Facebook or Myspace page.(3) MySpace brought social networking into the mainstream but it has been surpassed by Facebook. As of 2009, 19 percent of Google's unique visitors are referred by Facebook. (4) This suggests that Facebook may actually overtake Google in terms of number of unique visitors between 2011 and 2012. (5)

MySpace was the first social network to allow companies to create fan pages that users can join as friends. MySpace fan pages are not cheap: prices start at close to $100,000. Facebook followed suit, albeit with its own spin, offering both free fan pages and fee-based fan pages that can attract a significant amount of followers. For example, the Facebook fan page for actor Vin Diesel grew to 3.8 million followers in just a few months. In comparison, Coca Cola's Facebook fan page has 3.4 million fans. Facebook now boast more than a million fan pages with over 60 thousand that are consider top page having a /brandname over just a name and id.
Now Twitter houses massive consumer brand affinity , whereby, consumers “Follow” a brand Twitter feed and every major brand you can think of has a Facebook Fan page. What does this all mean?



For starters is creating a wealth of Social Intelligence never before seen enabling marketers to be smarter than ever before. The ability to truly understand their direct consumers as well as friends of their consumers and possible influencer is a major game changer in conversation induced marketing.


Marketers tapping into their social conversation is priority number one and reaching the right audience and affective composition is a driving force of these brand page going main stream. Utilizing UNBOUND's SNI platform enable the visualization of paid brand fan pages on Facebook.



As the chart illustrates, the growth of companies using the /brandname URL grew from 805 to 3301 from December 2008 to June 2009. Figure 2 provides a detailed breakdown of the friend growth of popular brand fan pages from December 2008 to April 2009. Now with Facebook opening up to any page owner that has over 5000 fans and had a page for over a year this has grown to an impressive 67K brand pages.

1. http://www.kenradio.com/content/view/1861/1/
2. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_04_16.pdf
3. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91395307068
4. http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-facebook-could-kill-google-analyst-2009-3?mtcCampaign=7662
5. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/compete-facebook-us-traffic-nearing-google-yahoo/

Over a Billion Affinity Connections and Counting

UNBOUND has reached a major mile stone going way beyond friend counts and general psychographics. Unbound has established unparalleled access to consumer brand affinities through the largest consumer brand insight database; which is available to brands, marketing professionals, researchers, and database marketing companies. Combining the four major social networks, UNBOUND leveraged the power of direct brand connections to your consumers by creating a 1 billion consumer brand segmentation linking to over 20 thousand major brands and over 1.4 million consumer generate vertical brand pages.

By using UNBOUND’s proprietary friend proximity algorithm, though the wealth of known affinities, UNBOUND has taken the community insight and social intelligence to the next level.Using brand affinity clusters provide large scale pin pointing of influencers; igniting consumer conversation where it matters the most. Come see the power at Ad:Tech NY Nov 4,5 - booth 2146

STARTING A BRAND CONVERSATION WITH AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING

STARTING A BRAND CONVERSATION WITH AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING

A. WHAT IS AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING?
Affinity-based marketing brings together merchants and consumers by identifying and communicating with “influencers” in consumer’s social networks. Consumers have brand affinities based on either a particular product’s identification as a status symbol or common “feel good purchases.” Consumers on social networks connect to brand-based groups and pages, as well as fan pages for musicians, films, and other content. Consumers who link themselves to brands can serve as possible brand advocates. The interaction with the influencer creates an association that links brands to large-scale social networking communities, thus generating ongoing sales revenue.

B. BUILDING AN AFFINITY-MARKETING SYSTEM
Three major components interact to form any powerful affinity-based marketing system: consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, and network-to-network (N2N) marketing.

1. CONSUMER-TO-CONSUMER (CNC) MARKETING

a. CONSUMERS
Most consumers do not save or “bookmark” the websites of major brands. The reality is that social network profiles are the most frequent destinations for users. As a result, sites such as iGoogle, My Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are all fighting to become the user’s home page. This means that traditional internet marketing is becoming less effective. There is only so much screen real estate for banner ads. Search keyword marketing is also becoming less useful. Businesses are competing for the same key words, which makes it less effective and more expensive than in the past.

The strongest alternative to banners and keyword advertising is word-of-mouth marketing. Taking advantage of the viral nature of consumer conversations has always been the best way for brands to obtain both public mind share and market share. Affinity marketing is word-of-mouth marketing for the Internet age. It combines traditional word-of-mouth marketing approaches with the quantifiable reach of the Internet to build a stronger, more substantial connection with the target audience.

b. INFLUENCERS

A growing body of research is establishing that certain people have more influence than others on the purchase decisions of friends, family and associates. Brands ranging from the largest to the smallest need to understand that knowing who their potential customer’s influencers are and how to tap into their networks can be the deciding factor for a product’s acceptance.

Influencers can be categorized into a few different types. First, celebrities can be influencers. These people may include sports figures (e.g., professional or Olympic athletes), musicians, politicians, actors, and entertainers of all types. Another type of influencer is the person who has a closer connection with friends and family. These are people who have a direct relationship with an individual and are connected within their social circle. Regardless of the specific type of influencer, brands must both identify with these individuals and incentivize them to talk about their products or services. Thus when marketers purchase web advertising, they are not only communicating to their prospective customers, they are also advertising by proxy to the friends, colleagues, and family members of influencers.

c. WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING AND WIDGETS

In the face of the dwindling effectiveness of banners and keywords, widgets are an essential component to word-of-mouth advertising over the Internet. Most significantly, widgets can go “viral” when injected into social networks, and through the use of influencers, a widget can carry a brand’s message further more people than ever before.

d. THE MOMENTUM EFFECT

The C2C value of affinity-based marketing comes from seeing the brand represented within one’s social network. The proliferation of a company’s brand through a social network allows the creation of a momentum effect: the active participation of consumers in communicating personal stories that use a brand, product, song or film as the reference point. The benefits of the momentum effect are significant. Research conducted by Yahoo! found that influencers or advocates have a 2:1 conversion impact across categories. This means that each single sale to an influencer converts two people to the same product. Influencers also tend to embrace consumer-generated media more than their peers, often to an online retailers' advantage. Customers benefit by gaining access to quality goods and services, usually at a discount, while supporting the association or group of their choice.



2. BUSINESS-TO-CONSUMER (B2C) MARKETING

Affinity-based marketing leverages the momentum effect C2C interaction to develop a B2C value creation model. Thus, the measurement of value isn’t just a message sent from a business to a consumer; the measure is the impact the message has on the consumer who receives it. The initial communication is B2C but the message takes on a life of its own as consumers use it, forward it and share it amongst themselves. Thus, social networking becomes part of the product experience, and the value of social networking extends to increase in advocacy and loyalty. Impact repeats as pass along continues. Each interaction is an impression.

3. NETWORK-TO-NETWORK (N2N) MARKETING

By far the most important step for any brand is to establish a N2N presence based on consumer registration. The latest web technologies have created a unique opportunity to truly engage an audience and build a presence where consumer’s friends give brands the power to create syndication networks within networks. Corporations have collected consumer emails from a variety of points such as newsletter signups, product registration and contests. The main problem with consumer email lists is that they are only as good as the collected information. A corporate email list is a treasure trove once these emails are mapped directly to a person’s social presence. Emails lists are valuable assets if they are intelligently segmented based on social demographics, social connections and matched affinities. Companies may create widgets to initiate B2C communications. Users may then share these widgets in C2C interactions. Consumers are demanding more interactivity and a richer media experience on the Internet, thus requiring data-driven C2C interactions. The N2N approach provides a real collaborative hub that empowers companies with the ability to connect and understand its customers.

C. UNBOUND’S AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING SOLUTION IS SUPERIOR TO TARGETED MARKETING

1. SOCIAL MAPPING TECHNOLOGY

For companies interested in reaching consumers, including influencers, the single most important question: where are consumers gathering and who are they connected to? UnBound’s affinity-based marketing platform, which builds upon the previously mentioned concepts, provides the answer.

First, UnBound has developed affinity maps, which are data sets identifying large numbers of social connections. This is achieved by grouping individuals in a social network who have allied themselves with a brand. Second, UnBound has created the first algorithm that enables social ranking based on social connections, thus allow companies to identify influencers.


This algorithm creates social density maps. The creation of a social density map is a multi-step process. It begins with a consumer’s micro-graph, which details a person’s direct connections to other people, places, things, and other affinities. Through the analysis of a large set of these micro-graphs, a macro-graph is created based on second degree connections. By monitoring the social density linked to the most popular key categories, one can determine possible influencers: people that are the most connected to others in a particular social network. Social density mapping can be combined with cross-affinity maps to create very powerful view into the make up of user communities.

2. UNBOUND’S ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE

Brands that have a clear understanding of their consumer’s connections, affinity and social density have the unique opportunity to start a conversation with their key social influencers. UnBound’s technology platform provides the only available tools to analyze social density through consumer affinity maps. The competitive advantage provided by this toolset is essential in developing a truly sustainable social campaign. Established brands that have the insight to collect email from newsletter options, contests, consumer registration and ecommerce sites can both see where their customers are on the social graph and find which existing customers are social influencers. Brands can then target conversation starters.

Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Thank you Susan and Shiv this was a great pod cast and the blugs were cool for UNBOUND.

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/232-dishymix/episodes/42919-shiv-singh-razorfish-social-influe

Episode 103: Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Shiv Singh is VP, Social Media and Global Strategic Initiatives at Razorfish, one of the top digital agencies in the world. In perfect alignment, he also holds an MSc (Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science on social network theory. And he’s writing, “Social Influence Marketing for Dummies.” Dude knows of what he speaks...

Suz and Shiv discuss four of the top "Trends in Social Influence Marketing" from the insightful and masterful Razorfish "Digital Outlook 2009" report:

1. The Focus Will Shift to Influencers
2. Social Advertising Will Grow Up
3. The Portable Social Graph Will Fuel Marketing Innovation
4. Not Just Friends, but "Friendsters," Will Start to Matter

Shiv breaks down his thoughts about where the three categories of Social Influence Marketing are going - listening, advertising and participation. Shiv's favorites are companies doing Appvertising, like ContextOptional, BuddyMedia and SocialMedia.com and companies doing social graph analysis like Media6Degrees and Unbound Technologies.

Unbound Technology's ability to cluster social graphs by kinds of products, services, public figures and media they "fan" on Facebook (called Affinity Maps) is giving marketers a distinct advantage in gaining insight into clustered preferences. Suz shares some of the key affinities in her map on the show.

If you are interested in tracking the most cutting edge thought about where marketers are taking the social media opportunity, this show will delight and educate you.

Click now to listen!