Behind The Feeds

SimpleFeed will be showing at two Social Media Conferences in New York City this week.

First up is Useful Social Media’s Corporate Social Media Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday at the New York Helmsley.

On Thursday June 17^th we cross town to exhibit at OMMA Social at The Millennium Broadway.

Both shows are packed with great social content. If you are interested in Enterprise Social Media Marketing technology, please stop by our booth.

Just back from three days at the Unica Customer Conference which SimpleFeed was pleased to sponsor. Some highlights from 3 days in Orlando.

Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester introduced her concept of the “SplinterNet” – basically the Apple and Facebook silos/walled gardens where people increasingly spend time and money. She argued that the SplinterNet requires a new set of marketing skills.  Campaigns give way to relationships and media buying is becoming less important than developing interactive experiences for the SplinterNet. Matt Smith of Best Buy amplified these ideas – “You have to be in market when customers are willing to listen, not when you want to start a campaign.” “Social is not a marketing change, but a business change – don’t just change your campaign, change the way you do business.” For example, Best Buy is putting 2-D bar codes on products in its stores. Customers can scan the codes and can read reviews in store on their phone.

In the mobile/social panel, Fidipidi demoed their Facebook application which allows user to create personalized greeting cards which are printed and mailed. Their app integrates with your Facebook photo album as a content source for the cards as well as with your friends list to remind you of birthdays. Akin Arikan of Unica finished the session with a great outline of the key social media metrics based on business objective – branding, lead generation, market research or engagement.

Finally in the Social Media Case Study session, our mutual customer, Rich Reich of Citrix, outlined his framework for content, behavior, technology, logistics and measurement of Social Media. Attendees leaned forward and took notes on how to get a handle on social media and sell it to senior management. Looking forward to lots of cool things coming down the road from Citrix.

Many of our customers are under increased pressure to show ROI on their social media investments. Some encouraging news from two sources this week.

In a survey of over 1,500 people 67% of Twitter users and 51% of Facebook users said they would be more likely to buy something from a company they follow or fan. Read the whole article for some choice comments about those ignoring social media.

According to a second survey from Marketing Sherpa of over 2,000 marketers, Social Media is very or somewhat effective for improving web site traffic (95%) and believe the same for improving search engine rankings (87%).

Exciting results from two prospectives.

Great Marshall Kirkpatrick post on Read Write Web today where he argues that Facebook, not Google, may end up being the biggest RSS Reader.

Why? Everyone is on Facebook and they understand how to consume content via the Newsfeed. For publishers it is flexible and inherently social & viral. He links to a recent post on the Facebook corporate blogt where they explain how to set up your account to read syndicated content.

At SimpleFeed we are seeing customers and prospects fanning corporate pages in enormous numbers. Whether it is via RSS Readers, at Facebook or in Twitter attention and opt-in is great news. In any event, the implication for companies- get publishing to the Facebook Wall!

New chart from Marketing Sherpa this morning showing social media objectives being measured by corporations. The various phases are the maturity of the social media process (1. no process, 2. informal process, 3. formal process).

Interesting to see what is being measured. Traffic, Lead Generation, Sales and SEO are the top 4 – obviously direct marketing objectives. Is 2010 the year Social goes direct?

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a great article on Social Media and ecommerce. They reference a comScore survey that ended on Monday (and no one seems to be referencing) stating that 28% of shoppers are influenced by social media.  According to the article,

“6 percent were influenced by a friend’s status update on Facebook, while 3 percent said they followed the advice of a Twitter tweet. Also, 7 percent of the respondents joined a retailer’s Facebook fan page – and 5 percent began following a retailer on Twitter – to get special holiday offers and discounts.”

Small percentages to be sure, but keep in mind this is the pretty much the first holiday season that corporations has been able to participate in social networks.

If I am making a purchase of over $100, I find myself Fanning and Following a merchant hoping to get a discount. It’s faster and more effective than searching for a coupon code. It’s better for the retailer as well as they get potentially viral distribution for their content.

I have the good fortune to be a the Intel CEO Summit today. The theme this year is “The Social Media Tsunami.” The keynote examined the affects of social media on all aspects of business from marketing to IT. During the keynote, they played the video below to 400 start-up CEOs and corporate executives. So if you have not seen it yet, now is the time as your boss probably just watched it.

According to Inside Facebook, 8 million people become a fan of a Page everyday.  Given marketers can publish to their fan’s newsfeed where they increasingly spend their time; the race to get fans is on.  Hence, we see Honda running TV ads during NFL football games promoting their fan page. Today Sears launched exclusive deals for its fans.

Is it a good idea? According to Razorfish, 37% of connected consumers cite exclusive deals or offers as the main reason for becoming a fan of a brand in social environments. For now, they want deals. In the future content will play a bigger role, as shown on our favorite fan page.

Long time SimpleFeed customers know we view SEO as a secondary benefit of feeds. But that may be changing. The big news in RSS last week was this blog post from Google announcing they use RSS for page discovery and rank.

It has long been understood that feeds seem to help place your pages higher in organic search results. Search spiders better understand XML based feeds than HTML or Flash based pages. Further feeds make syndication as easy as cutting and pasting a URL. Besides a one-to-many distribution point for your content typically at the point of purchase, these syndication points represent “high quality inbound links” that Google weights heavily in Page Rank.

Really these are benefits enough, but add to it a new way to get your content into Google and properly structured RSS Feeds (pinging, yes; robots.txt, no) become a must in 2010.

While we are on the topic, here is our all time favorite example.

Kudos to SDT Ltd for their syndication hat trick of SimpleFeed customers.