Predictions for online advertising in 2011

Much has been said of ‘likes’, followers and views in 2010 as the social media marketing industry has tried to emphasize the value of engagement to clients. However, while there is most certainly value in engagement, it has and always will be fairly difficult to quantify, particularly if it is not at a massive scale; i.e. sales spikes can be matched to graphed mass engagements. In response to this many social platforms and third parties have grown up over the past year and have been working hard at maturing their ad platforms and reporting tools. Brands, companies and the advertisers acting on their behalf are now faced with an exciting year ahead as there are many more marketing channels and targeting opportunities available.

There have been some interesting trends developing over the last year and we will now outline them and look at how they might become more important to clients and advertisers alike in the coming year.

The rise of local advertising and promotion with location technologies

2010 saw an enormous surge of activity around location based technologies.  This was helped mainly by the now almost universal adoption of smartphones and their seamless integration with social media platforms.  Foursquare ruled the roost for the majority of 2010 with it’s innovative location based tagging technology and was accompanied by a number of other interesting services; Yelp and Shopkick to name a couple.  Then the mighty Facebook came along and stirred things up with its Places service.

From a user perspective these location based technologies augment the social media experience into the physical world;  you can find out which of your friends are physically closest to you for example.  However, the real benefit to business has come in the form of blending this technology with loyalty rewards and deals.  For example, if you regularly check into Joe Blogs’ cafe using your location app on your iPhone you could earn the right to a free coffee.   Another slightly different form of local advertising has grown up in the form startups like Groupon and Wowcher.  These focus on community backed discounts for local products and services.  If you can get x amount of your friends to join a time-sensitive offer for the local business y, you will all be elegible for the discounted product or service.  Groupon or whoever then get a kickback for having introduced a significant amount of new custom to business y.  It’s an elegant system and one that is proving to be very successful judging by Groupon’s meteoric rise in the last few months.  These are an incredibly powerful developments that show true innovation in marrying together the dynamism of social networks with real-world benefits.  This is surely a trend that will continue to grown in 2011.

Influencers will become the celebs of the web

More than ever before consumers are scouring the web for travel recommendations, product specs, restaurant reviews etc. It comes as no surprise that brands and those that represent them are desperately analysing, reviews, blog posts and Twitter feeds to see what consumers are saying about them.  I experienced this first hand recently when having failed to get anywhere with my home Broadband provider (Virgin Media, I know you’re listening).  I’d been trying the normal channels for assistance – foreign call centers etc.  It was extremely frustrating so I decided to fire up my company Twitter profile (7.5k followers) and complained about the lack of connectivity and said I though about leaving them.  Sure enough within a minute I had a reply with a direct number to a UK rep.  They arranged an engineer to come the same day and my problem was sorted.  Well done Richard Branson!  They are clearly putting Twitter to excellent use as an eCRM tool.  Now I wonder whether they would have responded that quickly had I only 50 followers? In an interesting thought. Anyway, this goes some way to demonstrating the importance attributed to influence online these days and it was nice to have experienced it first hand.  Us social media marketers are so used to reporting on others’ experiences and proselytising about how our industry can identify influencers and nurture them to the benefit of your brand, but I can now continue saying this with a little more confidence!

Traditionally, the measure of importance pinned on to these mentions was how big a readership a blog had or how many Twitter followers a user had.  While these factors are important they are not necessarily a true measure of the influence a specific touch point might have.  There have been many attempts to rationalise the influence data that can be gathered from individuals and rank it against others.  Automatically correlating sentiment with influence is pretty hard and there are some big boys in the market like Radian6, Lithium and Meltwater Buzz (too pushy a sales team IMHO if you’re listening!).  While they all have lovely GUIs and pretty charts, they are generally a little overpriced.  There isn’t much they can tell you that you can’t readily find out using a bit of savvy and a collection of other tools.  Which is what we do.  They also lack a human interpretation of machine gathered intelligence which is where Centrality Media tries to make up the difference.  There is a very cool service called Klout which sits on top of Twitter and measures the influence and potential reach of Twitter profiles.  Below is what they do in their own words…. Oh, and did I mention they are free?

What is the Klout Score?

Understanding the Influence Metric

Klout Score

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engage audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet, a comment, or a click. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person’s Klout Score. The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.

True Reach

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience. We eliminate inactive and spam accounts, and only include accounts that you influence. To do this we calculate influence for each individual relationship taking into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it.

True Reach is broken into the following subcategories:

• Reach
  • Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
  • How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
  • Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?
• Demand
  • How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
  • How often are your follows reciprocated?

Factors measured: Followers, Mutual Follows, Friends, Total Retweets, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.

Amplification Probability

Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. How often do your messages generate retweets or spark a conversation? The ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.

Amplification Ability is a composite of the following subcategories:

• Engagement
  • How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
  • Are you broadcasting or participating in conversations?
• Velocity
  • How likely are you to be retweeted?
  • Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
• Activity
  • Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
  • Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?

Factors measured: Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message, Update Count.

Network Influence

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Engagement is measured based on actions such as retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to the authority and the quality of your content. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content. Network Score looks at the Klout score of each person who interacts with you to determine:

• How influential are the people who @ message you?
• How influential are the people who retweet you?
• How influential are the people who follow you?
• How influential are the people who list you?
• How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?

Factors measured: List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenters

Anyway, as you can see, this is a great free service which is far reaching in its features.  We expect there to be a lot of emphasis placed on influence in 2011 as the industry is forced to further rationalise ROI to its clients.

Segmentation of social networks

Zuckerberg’s vision of an ever expanding hyper-connected and open social web seems to show no sign of abating.  However, it seems that a growing group of early adopters are experimenting with new platforms to communicate and share with smaller audiences.  Path is proving itself as a platform even though it limits its social networks to 50 users.  Fast Society is a new iPhone communication service which allows the user to create small groups to text with on the fly.  The groups are transitory but practical, lasting only 3 days.  Facebook’s revamped Groups feature allows users to segment their friends into personal, professional and interest based communities.  The benefit of this feature is quite obvious.  Having not made it into work due to a ’bout of flu’, it allows one to discuss with friends what fun was had the night before without the boss finding out!  Keep an eye out for further segmentation in 2011 as social media users search for a deeper, more intimate social networking experience.

Brands and businesses to become more like media companies

Social media has allowed businesses and brands the opportunity to generate their own news instead of relying on the traditional PR channels to disseminate publicity.  Through agencies such as Centrality Media, companies can more effectively utilise social media to get their message across to a far more targeted and receptive audience than ever before.  It is now possible to effectively manage budgets so that more focus can be placed on generating high quality content which is better suited to their audiences.  We can see brands such as Doritos aligning themselves with music artists and generating fresh, rich and engaging content for their consumers.  Brand loyalty is strengthened as more value is attached to their publicity.  We are sure to be seeing more brands and businesses getting involved with this media driven approach to publicity in the coming year.