Digital Ministry Articles by Tiphereth Gloria

11 Social Media Marketing Trends 2011

Digital Ministry — 2011-02-04

11 social media marketing trends for 2011

The rise and rise of curation -Paper.li, Storify, turn influencers into social journalists We are drowning in too much content, so “trusted sources” whether individuals or journalists become more and more important. Paper.li and Storify are platforms which help compile & disseminate curated content.
The always-on consumer - Smart phones, iPads, tablets, iPhones, Kindles. WiFi. It used to be the Three Screens report - TV, mobile, and computer. Now we may have up to 5 or 6 screens we juggle. It’s consumers revenge, because if we want to find the best price or don't get good service, we can search & find or be vocal about what we want - on the go.
Digital detox. We’re going to need it. Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Economy. The flipside to being a connected consumer is the antidote to devices and connections -opt-out. Lifestyles, weekends, events. To give people “no answer” in a society of hyper-connectedness, can be seen to be a slap in the face. So you need a “disclaimer” to say you’re out of contact, or you could be seen as rude.
Data. Visualized. Nicholas Felton inspires Foursquare data, creates Daytum, and proves personal social tracking can be useful and data can be sexy Daytum is a free (and paid if you want privacy) service that enables people to make analytical sense of their personal data.Now with an accompanying iPhone app to make data entry just that little bit easier. Inspired and created by Nicholas Felton whose personal data is made into exquisite annual report.
Influence. The velvet rope goes virtual. Score big in social and get preferential treatment. A Las Vegas hotel gives you better hotel rooms if you have a high Klout score, while Peer Index maps your topics, activity, audience & authority across major social profiles.
Information as magazines. Flipboard, Taptu, Pulse, Feedly, part of the transformation of how we ingest information. Proof that good design wins. Information overload means we have to scan, read, ingest, “get across” so much content every day. Apps manage web information in a far more visual and interesting way.
Auto-checkins - or background processing takes over. From iPhoto facial recognition to apps that checkin for you, welcome to the era of it being done for you. IntoNow is an app that listens to what you’re watching on TV, then checks you in automatically. It then shares the information with your social graph. Future Checkin automatically checks you into Foursquare without you having to take your phone out of your pocket.
Tagging as a marketing strategy. Instagram implements tags, all of a sudden it's a marketing & engagement platform. Lipton Brisk Ice Tea is using a tagging campaign via Instagram app and social community with a competition to print the best crowdsourced photo onto the can of iced tea.
Content syndication becomes app driven. The Guardian leads the way by opening its platform with a content API and a news feed plug-in for Wordpress
The gamefication of advertising. The New York Times iPad app HTML 5 game banner brings new fun to a tired format. HTML5 Gamified Banner Ad on the iPad from Glow Interactive on Vimeo.
Ubiquitous Geo-location. Geo is important. It’s just moving to the background so you get seamless info when you need it. Task Ave app, gives you an alert to do errands on your phone based on where you are Where the Ladies At app aggregates women checking into Foursquare and lets the guys know where to find the ladies.

That's how I see the rest of the year, and it could almost be renamed 2011 the year of the social application. I'm keen to hear what you see are the emerging trends for 2011.

Measuring Social Media Influence: How Greenpeace took down Nestle

Digital Ministry — 2010-11-25

Greenpeace Australia came and did a presentation for Social Media Club Sydney, about the social media component for their global campaign to get Nestlé to stop buying unsustainable palm oil from Sinar Mas, a global supplier that was destroying the south east Asian rainforests where orangutan’s were being threatened. I ran a social media analysis using Alterian SM2 to see how the Kit Kat brand in Australia was affected by Greenpeace campaign. The results show a clear negative impact on Kit Kat's brand sentiment, that's clearly attributable to Greenpeace's localising the campaign.

Greenpeace vs Nestle Kit Kat social influence case study

Here's Dae Levine from Greenpeace Australia presentation at Social Media Club Sydney, where she outlines how Greenpeace took 10 weeks to achieve the kind of result they took 10 years to do using offline channels.

A summary of the key learnings:

Greenpeace campaign succeeded in taking down the sentiment of KitKat to an extremely low level
Nestlé gave fuel to the campaign by having the YouTube video banned initially, causing international news services to pick it up, and giving the campaign oxygen (it went viral soon after)
Nestlé did not pro-actively respond using any social media, instead deleted Facebook comments and posted angry status updates around the use of the Nestlé logo by people within Facebook who wanted to bring awareness to the Greenpeace campaign, which caused even more uproar
Nestlé failure in social and its lack of social crisis management contributed significantly in Greenpeace success in the social campaigning
Two Australian specific tactical campaigns for KitKat - Desk Jockey and Take Back Time were launched early June to combat the negative impact of Greenpeace on the brand, but did not get enough traction to offset the overall decrease in brand sentiment until well after the capitulation of Nestlé

So the moral of the story? Old school PR methods of bunkering down will not help you in social media. Third party influence can drag your brand sentiment down, and unless you pro-actively crisis manage, you could be left well behind those who are active and understand social media strategy.

Australian Election 2010 - Social Media Match Fitness

Digital Ministry — 2010-07-25

The 2010 Australian Election is going to be an interesting one for social media analysis, because for the first time we will see to be able to see whether social sentiment is going to have an impact on how people vote. I started looking at this on Friday 16 July, the day before the election was called, and left the social media monitoring tool looking at the same keywords over the weekend which included the day of the election announcement. This analysis is from 1 to 18 July and includes mainstream media as well as strictly "social" media channels. Twitter has by far the largest volume of mentions for both parties.

"Australian Labor party mentions by social media channel"

"Australian Liberal Party mentions by social media channel"

To see the impact social media has on volume, look at the day that Julia Gillard started tweeting. It caused a spike almost as large as the day the election was called when you look at all media, but on Twitter itself, had more interest/volume than the election announcement.

"Labor Party social channel mentions over time"

"Impact of Julia Gillard joining Twitter on volume of mentions"

Net Sentiment score: Liberal Party in front

On Friday, the share of voice was dominated by Labor with 78% of conversations about Labor or Julia Gillard and 22% was for Liberal or Tony Abbott (for Australian domains only, I didn't have enough time to run a US and AU inclusive search). By the end of Sunday, even though the numbers had spiked massively in terms of the volume of conversation, and even with US domains included in the search, the share of voice had moved only 1%, 77% Labor to 23% Liberal. I also ran a sentiment score analysis on Friday and again post election announcement. Pre-election announcement: (1 is positive so both have a negative score)

Labor net sentiment 0.67
Liberal net sentiment 0.74

Post-election announcement including US domains (1 is positive so both have a negative score)

Labor net sentiment 0.67
Liberal net sentiment 0.70

So Liberal sentiment is going down and Labor's is steady. It will be interesting to keep watching this score to the election. I haven't looked at the entire "landscape" of the wider election sentiment in this analysis so the Greens and other parties issues are not included here, just the 2 major parties.

Analysis of Liberal & Labor social media efforts

There's poor form overall from both Liberal and Labor. They’ve both set up social channels but use them to broadcast messages just like they do in traditional media channels, and they let the emergent community monitor itself. Spam is a problem in Facebook for the Liberal Party (not that they do anything about it).

There are huge missed opportunities to respond to issues in social channels. Neither party is responding in any channel to the huge volume of discussion. They may or may not be monitoring the issues, but given the extremely negative sentiment regarding internet filter, and immigration policy and boat people, the Government could at least be pro-actively addressing these issues.

Here are the breakdowns

Australian Labor Party

Website

Newly relaunched site has 2 places for social engagement

- it’s a public forum – the main barrier to entry is that people must register

- can’t login with Facebook, Twitter OpenID or any other “social identity”

- people can give ideas for policy

- Blog is more an article feed – users can’t comment

- Interactive game – "Tony Abbott Hospital Cuts" game

Twitter

Australian Labor

http://twitter.com/AustralianLabor

1,680 Following 1,638 Followers

Joined 10 December 2009

Ratio:

Good following to followers ratio - they are making an effort to follow back everyone who follows them – best practice

Hashtags:

ALP Use of hashtags is not as smart as it should be. Inconsistently used, inconsistent naming, and too generic.
For example, tweets marked with #news and #blogs too generic and does not enable people to search for specific ALP topics relevant to them
Only started using specific hashtags Friday 16 July related to their 2 community forums #Thinktank and #LaborConnect
Again #ThinkTank could be anyone’s think tank and does not identify it as ALP. Should be #ALPThinkTank to make it work harder for them
Use Twitter lists as a way to track MPs but only one list

Content:

Not conversational at all – use it to broadcast blog article links, official announcements.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard

http://twitter.com/juliagillard

9,389 Following 20,752 Followers

Joined 27 October 2009 but only tweeting since July 4, 2010

Ratio:

Decent follower to following ratio, would say that since she’s been PM that it’s difficult to get the auto-follow to keep up with the amount of people following her each day

Content:

Strictly broadcast

Tweet content is partly first person, partly third person. Inconsistent tone suggests her account is managed by different people but there's no transparency on who’s tweeting on her behalf.

Facebook

Julia Gillard

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Gillard/161674172327

32,651 People Like

Australian Labor

http://www.facebook.com/LaborConnect

1,620 People Like

Facebook commentary is raging on every article or status posted in Facebook on Julia’s page but no official voice is responding.

The community is talking to itself here, on the wall, discussion board, but there is no input from the people running Julia’s page.

The community is left to run and moderate itself – not best practice

Minimal/no spam so the pages seems to be monitored but no responses back from anyone running the pages.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/user/australianlabor

Subscribers 1504

72 Videos

Channel Views: 185,685

Total Upload Views: 765,591

Style: Broadcaster

Joined: June 10, 2007

Australian Liberal Party

Website

has "support", "comment" and "like" social interaction features on the “Our Ideas” section of their website
“Our Ideas” as a name for this section does not suggest that feedback is elicited (i.e. they are Liberal Party ideas and they aren't interested in your ideas) or wanted and as a consequence doesn’t have a lot of responses

Twitter

Liberal Party

http://twitter.com/LiberalAus/

3,801 Following 4,261 Followers

Good following/followers ratio

Joined 4 April 2009

Content:

Strictly broadcast but well written tweets
Links to news content articles on Liberal website

Hashtags:

Easily identifiable and consistent use of hashtags
#myliberal and #ausvotes on every tweet.

Tony Abbott

http://twitter.com/TonyAbbottMHR

20 Following 10,950 Followers

Joined

Poor following ratio – doesn’t follow people back

Content:

Broadcast. Not conversational

Personal content with photos and descriptions, mixed in with jabs at the government and then also Liberal policy announcements.

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/LiberalPartyAustralia

6,751 People Like This

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tony-Abbott/216342268645

7,920 People Like This

Both these pages have Facebook spam (people linking to off topic or personal pages) suggesting its not viewed or monitored very well.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/liberalpartytv

74 Videos

Subscribers: 6

Channel Views: 20,985

Total Upload Views: 230,283

Joined: September 28, 2008

Summary

Neither Liberal nor Labor parties are responding in any of the social channels - they are too busy "broadcasting" messages and leaving the communities to manage and moderate themselves. The debates are raging (on and off topic) in Facebook and Twitter, but with no official responding voices in any party channels. The only minor benefit is that the parties are taking the political messages into the social spaces where the voting public spend the majority of their time online.

What do you think? Would the political party that addressed the issues in social spaces get any brownie points going into this election?

iPhones dominate Australian mobile internet

Digital Ministry — 2010-06-21

As an early adopter of the iPhone, I've noted its enthusiastic uptake in Australia. Looking on the streets and in meetings, it seems to be the dominant phone, at least in Sydney. Recent statistics prove this, showing the iPhone and iPod touch is dominant operating system - 93% of phones or mobile devices accessing the internet in Australia and NZ are iPhone iOS.

93% of phones accessing the internet in Australia are iPhones

Yet this statistic globally tells a completely different story. iPhone and iPod touch (the newly defined iOS 4 platform) are at 60% of the mobile devices accessing the internet.

Global iPhone/iOS penetration is at 60%

Is Australia & NZ heavy iPhone penetration because Blackberry and other smart phones didn't have much mainstream uptake prior to iPhone release? Or is it because Australians are the heaviest users of social networks and social usage continues as the fastest growing mobile category? Either way, the statistics point to a massive behavioural change with mobile devices - phones are barely used for telephone calls, they are more data devices and the internet is in people's pocket. There are some other interesting statistics (this time global and just iPhone/iPod touch related)

225,000 applications in the iTunes app store
5 billion application downloads from iTunes store
73% of iPhone users have at least one 3^rd party app
70 is the average number of applications on an iPhone
There will be 100 million iOS 4 devices by July 2010

This is the mobile landscape that the iAd platform is releasing into, although the iPad will be unable to see iAds until the iPad upgrade to iOS 4 likely to be September 2010. iAd may transform digital display advertising in the same way that iPhone transformed phones, and with the app developers getting 60% of the revenue to fund further free/cheap application development. What the hope for iAd is to bring emotion & interactivity via content to digital platforms with no "hijacking" or need to leave or be directed out of the apps themselves. This in itself may bring a level of trust back to the digital space, where click through rates have been declining year on year. The question then will be: will the "emotionally engaging" iAds lift the rest of the digital display ad industry?

5 social media trends to watch

Digital Ministry — 2010-06-14

There are some social and digital trends which seem to hit like an avalanche, and others that build quietly and don't go away. I wanted to share this list, as a bit of a combination of both types, originally written for The Communications Council of Australia. You can substitute "social" with "digital" because there's not much happening in the digital world without social integration of some sort.

Geo-locations. Since November 2009 geo location aware social services are hotting up. Foursquare, launched 50 cities (including Australia) outside of the US, it’s mobile app makes geo location social a fun game. Twitter has had a tweet your location also since Nov 09 and Facebook’s soon to launch “Places” tab has been described as a Foursquare killer Google is trying to catch up with Latitude while SimpleGeo rakes in the venture capital, describing itself as “iTunes for geodata”
Social shopping. Facebook reworked Facebook Connect into a super simple to implement Open Graph and its already changing the way most destination sites interact with their users. The biggest innovations will be in “socialising” the online shopping experience – seeing what your friends like and buy. A great version can be seen at Levis US store.
Using a Facebook Page instead of a microsite. After the launch of the the new logo and look in Australia and the success of Hit Refresh, Pepsi Australia dispensed with their website and now run the Pepsi Australia Facebook Page as a customer engagement hub.
Blogs are everywhere Blogspot, Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, the blogging platforms just keep getting easier and more flexible. The amount of blogs increase every year as brands, companies and individuals are using blogs to optimise their SEO and express their opinions. Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 describes 4% of blogs as “corporate” while BlogPulse has indexed more than 126 million blogs.
Would you like an app with that? iPhone and iPad apps go from strength to strength. The phone game changer is now the “tablet” device game changer. Magazine and newspaper publishers like WIRED magazine, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and GQ are hoping iPad and iPhone subscriptions will keep people engaged on new platforms, and boost interest in content that’s flagging in a printed format. So far, the initial edition of WIRED for iPad is outselling the print edition. iPads will change the way people consume content, whereas iPhone will continue to influence the way people create social content on the go. The most popular camera on Flickr is still the iPhone 3G

What do you think the other digital trends we should be watching?

photo credit: cycle60