You've heard it said a million times that for Facebook, you're not the customer, you're the product. Well, here's a “How Does Facebook Make Its Money?” infographic that explores some of how—and how much—you get bought and sold. This is a big graphic so you've got to click here to see the whole thing.
Note down near the bottom the price per click for those ads you see in the sidebar, promoted posts, and sponsored stories.You've heard, no doubt, that teens are leaving Facebook in droves. iStrategyLabs has got the stats on that: 3 million fewer of the youth on FB now than three years ago. What you don't hear about so much, but that the same research points out, is that while the kids are down by 25%, the 55-and-over cohort has gone up by 80%, or over 12 million, during the same time period.
Why? The general theory is that the oldsters want to connect with their high school buddies, and the high school kids don't want to party with the 'rents. This has received widespread anecdotal support (I asked my daughter, and Business Insider asked two kids). Also, there's research from the UK. Teens are moving to Twitter, Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat. (Instagram, of course, is owned by Facebook, so Mr. Zuckerberg and the NSA will still have all that youthful data to mine. FB doesn't own Snapchat yet, but they're trying.) Bottomline: For teens, FB is just as over-the-hill as its incoming tide of senior posters. "Instagram is cooler..." says Catherine Calhoon, 14 of West Monroe, LA. --WTP
Media Musings by Andrew Mackay
When Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Meryl Streep are doing it, you know it’s time to sit up and take notice. What's more, U.S. President Obama, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt were caught indulging at Nelson Mandela’s recent memorial service.
So, what new phenomenon are we witnessing? A major initiative masterminded by an exclusive club whose members include some of the most influential and high profile women in the world? The creation of a new US-European political axis?
It’s none of the above, actually. Welcome, instead, to the new "art form" that is the selfie, so popular that it recently entered the Oxford Dictionaries, the arbiter of all matters concerning the English language, as the word of 2013.
The so-called art of self-photography ("self-portrait" would be too grand a term for the spur-of-the-moment self-snap that is the selfie) is the logical outcome of astounding advances in smart phone technology and the power of social media, where hundreds and thousands of these images are posted every day. Social media have given rise to yet another medium, made possible by new technology and the ego-gratifying social impulses it enables.
You won’t find modesty and restraint in the selfie lexicon, but plenty of self-regard and an unquenchable appetite for the oxygen of instant popularity.
Commerce Jumps Into the Picture: The Promotional Selfie
But there are selfies, and then there are promotional selfies. Where there is self-regard, you can be sure that self-promotion and product placement will soon jostle for centre stage.
While Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are, of course, already (and willing) outlets for celebrity wannabes, they are also fertile platforms for marketing innovation. These days, if you have a new bikini, cosmetic, or men’s grooming range to push, you don’t have to negotiate—and finance—‘advertorials’ in mass-circulation tabloids, arrange expensive and time-consuming competitions, or deal with the TV product placement people. No, social media now gives you the means to do it yourself for free, for as long as you like, and when you like—with the added bonus of reaching millions of potential consumers.
You don’t need a PhD in marketing to understand why brands with strong visual associations (think Nike, Starbucks, and MTV) have been quick to join the universal love-in of social media. In this utopian world, where objective critical judgement frequently goes out of the window in favour of the instant gratification of affirmation, brands, celebrities, and products have a willing and captive audience.
But where is the editorial objectivity that can give the consumer, or would-be purchaser, an informed opinion about this or that new product? Until now, the editorial endorsement of a positive review following, say, the launch of a new car or consumer product, has been vital to major brands. Is it possible that what is becoming more important is the ability to harness and influence the critical power that social media instantaneously bestows upon its followers?
See Me, See My Products
In the global village that is social media, anyone can become a journalist, reviewer, critic, or brand advocate. And the selfie is the social media promotional paradigm of the moment.
According to Simply Measured, a year after the Facebook acquisition, Instagram had 100 million monthly active users and had attracted 67 percent of the top global brands. Many are devising increasingly creative ways to engage with their followers in a double whammy that harnesses the visual power of Instagram with the popularity of Facebook.
Caroline Christy, a senior account executive at Chicago-based Zocalo Group, a word-of-mouth, social and digital marketing agency, says the increase in the popularity of selfies has been mirrored by a trend towards visual content from brands, which is reshaping digital marketing.
The Group’s clients are counselled to include an image along with every post shared on Facebook. Images on Twitter are quickly becoming commonplace and even best practice as well, Ms. Christy claims. “We’re definitely in the visual era, as consumers have less and less time to digest branded news. Pictures become the way to express ideas and are truly worth a thousand words,” she says (personal communication).
But What's the ROI?
It will be interesting to see if the use of selfies in brand promotional material does increase ROI, in much the same way that engaging content across social channels has been shown to. We plan to return to this topic, and to how media measurement providers are addressing the challenge, in a future Comment.
In the meantime, the mainly innocuous selfie has spawned a new, and increasingly viable, promotional platform for many of the world’s leading brands to engage with their consumers at a level, and to a depth of intensity, they could once only dream about.
(Thanks to The Cape Times and Lowe Cape Town for the faux celebrity selfies.)
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Andrew Mackay is a UK-based B2B communications consultant and copywriter. The views expressed in this article are his own.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of Salience Insight. Salience Insight is the media measurement division of News Group International – a global provider of business intelligence and media resource services. Salience is a fresh, new global brand which incorporates the former UK-based Report International and US-based KDPaine & Partners, acquired in 2012.
Business Insider has a couple of interesting pieces on social media usage around the world, especially in China. At "Confused By China's Social Networks? Here's A Simple Infographic..." you'll learn about China's various social networks, and the size of the top dozen. "The Planet's 24 Largest Social Media Sites..." is a subscription service teaser, but you'll still learn interesting things, including:
In a study published at PLOS ONE, (Schwartz, et al., Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach) scientists at the University of Pennsylvania examined the language used in 75,000 Facebook profiles. The research shows that the language a person uses reveals a surprising amount about who the person is. The researchers found that they could predict a user’s gender with 92% accuracy. They could also guess a user’s age within three years more than half of the time. From the Abstract:
We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.
See also this artice at Mashable. -- WTP
Business Insider has a new report out on social media demographics. The teaser article includes some interesting stats, including:
Huge thanks to Business Insider for pointing us to Wolfram Alpha, "the geekiest site on the 'net." Social media measurement fans who want a quick glance at some charts on how Facebook posts change as people age should check out Business Insider's article "24 Charts That Show How People Talk Totally Differently On Facebook As They Get Older." The chart we show here demonstrates that, if you are a guy, you are apparently predestined to talk people's ears off about politics as you age. #can'twaitforthat
But for the full math-and-data geek experience, head over to Wolfram Alpha, a math nerd's playground. In "Data Science of the Facebook World," Stephen Wolfram himself looks at Facebook data contributed by users. Includes the age charts mentioned above, also much, much more fascinating data on who uses Facebook and how. For instance: Facebook users in Iceland, Brazil, the Philippines, and Mississippi have especially large number of friends. --WTP
This morning from Business Insider: "How Many Of Your Friends See Your Facebook Posts? The Debate's Over, It's 35%." Actually, it's only 29% if your post has no comments or likes.
Now, if you were a baseball player and you batted .290, you'd be doing just fine. But if your phone only worked 1/3 of the time, you'd chuck it out. How many other communication media would you use if your message got through only 1/3 of the time? --Bill Paarlberg, editor
From the Washington Examiner comes this article about how the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs spent $630,000 on Facebook, and is now feeling the heat for reaching the wrong audience. Although the spending increased the Bureau's English-language Facebook page likes from 100,000 to more than 2 million and to 450,000 on foreign-language pages, the Office of Inspector General said the effort failed to reach the bureau's target audience, which is largely older and more influential than the people liking its pages. You can read the entire report in the article. --WTP (thanks to UPrinting for the image)
In today's New York Times Magazine is the article "Data You Can Believe In" by Jim Rutenberg. It conveys two fascinating stories. First, details of how the Obama campaign used data in unprecedented ways to win the 2012 election. See below for a quick summary.
Second, background on the major data analysis players and what they have gone on to do after the election. You'll apprecate their adventures if you're hunting for corporate jobs in data analytics, or trying to understand how to balance your desire to change the world with your desire to change your paycheck.
How data won the election
Last fall, when we gave Daniel Wagner and the staff of the Obama Cave our Measurement Maven of the Month award, we provided a rough overview of how they used the data. Today's NYTimes article gives a much clearer picture of their strategy and just which data streams were used and how.
First they used Facebook data on the friends of existing Obama supporters to identify 15 million persuadable swing voters. Then they built an "optimizer" to match cable TV set-top box viewing data with the swing voters to maximize the efficiency of their TV ad buys:
"The results were striking. The campaign determined that two of the top shows to buy were 1 a.m. repeats of “The Insider” and afternoon episodes of “Judge Joe Brown” — shows that were far cheaper than the evening news or anything being shown on the networks in prime time.
"...the optimizer helped... do what most strategists deemed impossible in a campaign between two well-financed opponents — talk to undecided voters through television advertisements on shows on which the opposition was not running a countermessage.
"In the end... Obama paid roughly 35 percent less per broadcast commercial than Romney did... Obama and his supporting super PAC got nearly 40,000 more spots on the air than Romney and his super PACs did despite spending roughly $90 million less."
Go read the article. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor (Thanks to ShareTV for the image.)
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The Measurement Standard is a publication of News Group International.
The latest entry in the epic What's A Facebook Fan Worth? discussion comes from Syncapse, pegging this mystic social media marketing number at $174.17. Download their report here.
Syncapse's chart at the left demonstrates that the $174.17 average varies so widely between brands as to make an average figure pretty much useless. As have been most efforts to nail down the elusive number.
The best discussion of this topic we've seen is by Olivier Blanchard, "The 5 basic rules of calculating fan/like/follower value." In which he goes over the reasons why an average is often just marketing snakeoil, but brand- and context-specific calculations can be very informative.
The hunt for the value of a Facebook fan is the modern day equivalent of the Alchemist's search for the Philosopher's Stone. It's more worthwhile for the research insights it yields than for locating the actual item itself.
What strikes me as really interesting about this Syncapse report is their comparison of fans vs. nonfans: "they tend to be brand users first, they spend more, engage more, advocate more, and are more loyal." See the chart below.
Some marketers may take this as proof of the value of investing in encouraging people to become fans. But what if fans are just different people from non-fans? What if some people just naturally want to be fans and behave like fans, yet other people, with different personalities, don't?
Maybe fan-based social media marketing works on some people (who are inclined by their nature to become fans), but just does not work on other people. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor
Olivier Blanchard's post on the cost and value of a Facebook fan ("The 5 basic rules of calculating the value of a Facebook ‘fan’") is, at almost two years old now, no spring chicken, social media-wise. But I promise that his insights will still juice up your next cocktail party, meeting with your agency, or interview with a prospective social media measurement hire.
His discussion of why the cost of reaching a potential customer is not equivalent to the value of that customer is brilliant. He develops an excellent framework in which to discuss cost vs. value of customers acquired for any medium.
I especially like his emphasis on the idea that these types of cost and value figures are averages across a wildly fluctuating population. A fan or customer's value is likely to be very flexible between individuals, over time, and between products. So to come up with some average and claim it's useful as the value of a fan is pointless:
...the notion that the “value” of a Facebook fan can be calculated absent the context of purchasing habits, brand affiliations, fluctuations in buying power, market forces and shifts in interests and even value perceptions is bunk.
-- WTP (thanks to KDPaine for the tip, and to Olivier Blanchard for the illustration)
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Wow. If you have anything to do with measuring the success of your Facebook page, or if you've ever wondered how many of your fans actually see your Facebook posts, then you have to look at Emeric Ernoult's post on the Convince and Convert blog. Although it's called "Busting Facebook’s Most Widespread Myth," it's really a primer on the complex world of Facebook reach metrics. Here's a sample:
...pages in the range of 100,000 fans have an average fan reach of 6.7%. However, the average of the worst 5% performing pages shows a reach of 0.6% of fans (oops!), while the top 5% performing pages reach an average of 20% of their fans with each post.
There's a whole lot more. Go read the post. --WTP (thanks to Entrepreneur for the image)
Two days ago Dan Zarella authored a piece in the Harvard Business Review, "How to Calculate the Value of a Like," in which he presents a formula for calculating, yes, the monetary value of a Facebook like. The reaction has been fast and furious: read the comments on the article, and Olivier Blanchard's extensive response on his Brand Builder blog.
As you will see, Mr. Zarella has been thoroughly chastised for daring to present his formula. (I think people are perhaps being a little too quick to pig pile on the guy. Hey, he never promised the Unified Theory of Social Media.)
It's a great food fight to review, because the topics and arguments tossed back and forth reflect much of the huge challenge and frustration of measuring social media. Just what about social media interactions are of value, and how do you go about measuring that value? What is value, anyway?
And, finally, what's the best way to write a blog post that presents dramatic content while at the same time promoting your own business? Both Dan and Olivier are experts on that one. --Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
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(Thanks to MD Nexus for the image.)
Would-be Facebook owner Paul Ceglia has been indicted on charges that he faked a $25 billion contract with Mark Zuckerberg giving him a stake in the social media giant. See our previous coverage. Ceglia was arrested and charged last month with one count each of wire fraud and mail fraud. He apparently doctored a legitimate 2003 contract with Zuckerberg, in which the future CEO agreed to perform coding work for Ceglia’s website, into a phony contract “in which Zuckerberg agreed to provide Ceglia with at least a 50 percent interest in Facebook.” -- WTP
How much of social media icon Facebook's traffic is real, and how much is just spam or bots? Here are three studies that provide a quick guess: somewhere between 20 and 91 percent is real.
OK, these numbers are so rough that they mean very little -- except that a significant amount of Facebook traffic is not real people. Expect to see more data on this in the next future. And see this post by Russ Bradberry on the simplereach blog for an explanation of why there might not be as many bots as some claim. -- Bill Paarlberg, Editor
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(Thanks to http://declan.web44.net/images.html for the zombie robot image.)
Bill Paarlberg is editor of The Measurement Standard blog and newsletter, and of Katie Paine's book “Measure What Matters.” He is also editor of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” by Beth Kanter and Katie Paine, which will be published this year by Wiley.
Follow Bill Paarlberg on Twitter.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.
by Katie Delahaye Paine
I RARELY WRITE ABOUT CLIENTS or former clients in this column, but this time I really couldn’t resist. I had the privilege of supplying Facebook with some of its first public relations metrics back in 2007 and 2008. As we were presenting results in Palo Alto one day, Mark Zuckerberg joined the meeting. I took the opportunity to ask him how he defined success for his PR team. He paused and then said: “People will trust us more.”
I’ve used this story frequently since then to illustrate the difference between how CEOs define PR success and how PR defines success. At the time, we were measuring the usual volume and tonality and correlating it to new Facebook signups. And, while that was a pretty good outcome measure in our books, it clearly did not reflect the definition of success that Mr. Zuckerberg had in mind.
His interest in trust prompted me to give him our paper on how to measure trust. I also gave him a copy of my book, opened to the How to Measure Trust chapter. (Click here now to buy Measure What Matters. Or click here to download just the chapter on measuring trust at no charge.) He could have -- and should have -- started right away to measure the trust that people had in Facebook. Might have saved some recent grief.
But I tend to doubt that Mr. Zuckerberg heeded my advice, since in the intervening years, Facebook has made little effort to bolster people's trust. Abrupt policy changes, unclear privacy rules, and an appearance of secrecy have resulted in a growing chorus of concern among journalists, legislators and customers. And, since one of the measures of trust is reduced legal fees, I can guess just by reading the papers that their trust index isn’t going up. (For more on Facebook's trust issues, see this article in The Atlantic, where the chart above appears.)
Now that the social networking giant has gone public it has a whole new audience with which it needs to build trust: the millions of individual and institutional investors that purchased its stock last week. And it doesn’t sound like they’re feeling it right now: http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/23/technology/facebook-lawsuit/
Many people liken trust and good public relationships to a rainy day bank account. You build up trust with your stakeholders over the years by being honest and reputable and forthright. Then when you screw up -- and we all do, sooner or later -- you've got enough trust in your account so that they will forgive you.
I find it supremely ironic (but not that surprising) that four or five years ago Mr. Zuckerberg had the insight and wisdom to identify a vital thing his company needed to do to succeed: build up its trust account. Yet since then he appears to have stopped paying attention to that trust account and has paid more attention to his bank account instead, confusing account growth with value growth.
The constant drain on Facebook's trust account coupled with the giant mess that was the IPO has left nothing for a rainy day. And we’re guessing there will be a lot of rainy days in the next few months.
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(Thanks for the May 2012 poll results image above to AP-CNBC.)
Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.