Craig MacDonald of Covario guest-writes for Loyalty 360's State of the Industry series:
2011 introduced a very strange new word to digital marketing - the "Plus One" or +1 from Google. I'm not sure that is even a word - more like when the singer Prince renamed himself in the 1990s to a symbol (which everyone referred to as TAFKAP - The Artist Formerly Known as Prince). I don't like typing +1, because it requires me to hit the Shift key and remember where the Plus sign is on my keyboard. Hint - it is way up on the top right - next to the overused Backspace button. It is very awkward to hit. You have to twist your hand around to keep the Shift Key down and hit the Plus sign simultaneously. Google may find itself the target of class action lawsuits from people who get advanced carpal tunnel syndrome trying to +1 their favorite content.
+1 joins the Retweet and the Facebook Like as the lexicon of consumer engagement with Web content - both on search engines and on social media networks. If consumers like something on Google or on a Web page - they can +1 it. If they like a piece of content, they can retweet it or Like it on Facebook. These actions are being studied closely for clues as to what they might mean to marketers regarding how they drive customer loyalty.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it is no mystery that social media usage is on the rise - and by "social media" I really mean Facebook. Probably the most interesting statistic I have seen on this is that Facebook has about 750 million registered users, and 70% use the system occasionally, and nearly 30% use it actively. Twitter, by contrast, reports about 150 million registered users, but less than 5% use the system more than once per week and far less than 1% are considered Active.
Relative Activity on Social Media Platforms
Another interesting statistic from Comscore is that consumers spend an average of 470 minutes per month on their Facebook page compared to 350 minutes on Google. Advertisers, always attracted to places where eyeballs spend a lot of time, want in on the game. Advertisers are attempting to do two things with social media: Build their friend network so they can promote their brand by doing posts and figuring out what promotions and activities on social media networks actually drive engagement and loyalty. The jury is out on this - there are a couple of documented success stories (Starbucks is the most famous) - but clearly, not every business has the same promotion opportunities as Starbucks (come into our 10,000 stores on every corner in the country and get 10% off a latte). For the most part, advertisers are in flail mode - trying to experiment and figure out how to use this platform.
The second reason digital marketers, and particularly search marketers, are covering these social engagement statistics is a bit more technical. It is clear that Google and Bing are going to use +1s, Tweets and Retweets, and Facebook comments and Likes as ways they will ascertain the relevancy of content. They effectively plan to crowd source insight on content relevancy from these signals of customer engagement - and will use them in search engine optimization. Much like linking strategy - which Google uses to figure out what content is relevant or not by the number and quality of links to that content from other third party sites, in the social engagement world - all things being equal - a page that has more +1s and Likes through embedded icons on the page will rank above another page that has fewer.
And so, in 2012 - monitoring the impact of Google +1s and Facebook Likes is a big issue - how to arm the organization for driving these acknowledgements of interaction with the users of their Web content is one of the top priorities.
And that is not the only thing on which advertisers are focusing next year. In addition to leveraging social media to measure customer engagement - they are also focused on ... MOBILE! I did a webinar recently where I asked the participants to register their top priorities for 2012. As much flail as there is in the market around social media - there is even more on mobile marketing and how to leverage mobile to reach consumers. More than 40% of the respondents in the survey listed this as their No.1 issue next year. The other major issue cited is determining how appropriately to attribute credit to consumer interactions with different digital media channels.
With so many challenges on the horizon facing both search and social media marketers - mobile, Facebook advertising, attribution modeling - the participants in the webinar were in agreement. 2012 is a year of huge possibility -- or not. If advertisers do not address leveraging social media to engage customers, and do so increasingly through mobile devices, and then figure out how to measure the value through attribution modeling - then 2012 is a lost opportunity. Dare I say - a "-1."
Facebook Stats
https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Twitter Stats:
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-has-less-than-21-million-active-users-2011-4
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-active-users_b6628
http://www.designtaxi.com/news/34090/Report-Most-of-LinkedIn-Users-Don-t-Use-the-Site
