According to recent research by Sysomos, Twitter users have changed. Not only have they grown in numbers: they’ve grown up and have a more mature approach to Twitter.

It’s a collective acquisition of behaviours and uses that shows clearly Twitter is headed towards more engagement and more interaction between people (and brands, too).

A few insights from the research:

• Many have understood the importance of trust: the use of Twitter “bios” to tell people about their identity has increased (31% to 69%);

• Relevance is also important: having a detailed name helps to show a there’s a real person behind the account. Detailed user names have increased (33% > 73%);

• Differentiation is becoming one of the main challenges in social media, and attributes like location or website URL help develop it. Both these parameters have been communicated by many more Twitter users than last year;

• The number of users has increased, but also the average number of followers has grown, proving that new accounts are interacting well, learning from more experienced people;

What do you think about Twitter’s change? Do you feel its users are growing up and have a more effective approach to networking and conversation?

Google launches real-time, social web search
You might have noticed that Google looks a bit different, since announcing last week a couple of very important developments in the area of real-time search.

Google search results now include breaking news headlines, live updates from popular social networks, and blog posts published just seconds before. And the move is fully supported by the ‘who’s who’ of social networking: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter.

Forrester: Traditional agencies can’t do digital
A new study from Forrester last week highlighted the complexity of the interactive marketing landscape and the challenges this poses for marketers, and to traditional agencies:

Forrester interviewed about 100 global interactive marketers for the study. Only 23% thought their “traditional brand agency” could effectively plan and manage interactive marketing activities. About 46% thought they couldn’t do it, and the rest didn’t have an opinion either way.

Forrester expects the digital agency space to fragment even more with clients working with specialist agenices in areas such as mobile and social media.

Habbo Hotel launches conversation tracking tool
Habbo Hotel, the virtual world for teens with around 14 million monthly unique visitors, has launched a conversation measurement tool for the site called  ‘Habble’. This offers marketers a chance to understand what users are saying about their brands, slogans and key phrases over a defined period.

The tool has been developed to help brands advertising in the hotel and is used in conjunction with click-through rates, time spent and impressions. Brands not advertising within the virtual world can also use Habble to understand what type of conversations are taking place about them.

Germany’s StudiVZ adds support for 3rd party apps

Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.

Nine apps are available as of today and several hundreds are in development.

What sets this development apart is the emphasis that is being placed on privacy. Germany has some of the toughest online privacy laws in the world and CEO Markus Berger-de León has applied tight security policies to third-party apps “to avoid the type of scams that TechCrunch recently dug up on Facebook and MySpace.”

A nice reprise of the the classic What’s Next In Marketing & Advertising from Paul Isakson.

Clay Shirky at the recent TED@State conference:

In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. In a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants. In that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. And the choice we face, and I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn’t whether that’s the media environment we want to operate in – that’s the media environment we’ve got. The question we all face now is how do we make the best use of this medium, even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.

We had great news last week when we got the go ahead from Ford to continue into next quarter with This is Now, one of the pan-European campaigns we’ve been working on with them, meaning it will reach its 1st year anniversary in September.

Aside from being an amazing achievement for the team here at We Are Social who have been working so hard on it all of this time, it made me reflect on a discussion Sandrine had with Neil Perkin and Asi Sharabi in the comments of a post Neil wrote about the campaign just after it had launched.

Both Neil and Asi referenced Paul Isakson’s presentation on modern brand building:

Which has this killer quote:

Start looking at your marketing as a progressive story instead of as quarterly campaigns

Now this is something that all of us who have drunk the social media Kool-Aid take as gospel (and rightly so), but it’s often hard for both agencies and clients alike to actually implement in practice.

Although we’re finding progressive clients at all sorts of brands who get this, there are others who are perhaps more nervous of such a wholesale change in their marketing practices.

Then there are the structural issues to be overcome – Brand Managers typically change roles internally every two years and Marketing Directors don’t hang around much longer, which it makes it hard for any real long term commitment (especially if people new to the roles are keen to make their mark with a break from the past).

There’s also the question of the client’s other marketing activity (and their other agencies). It’s important that all of their marketing, from their advertising campaigns to their PR and experiential activity, works in unison and makes up a coherent whole and do not sit as isolated strands. Social media should be no different.

We have our own thoughts on this on how to deal with this dichotomy (and I have to say, we also have plenty of great case studies of successful short term social media campaigns), but it’s always more convincing to hear it from others. Over to Forrester’s Josh Bernoff:

Social [media campaigns] take a while to build, but last a long time. Think about the effort it takes to get people reading your blog, following your Twitter feed, viewing your YouTube videos, joining your community, or friending your Facebook page. They all start with zero viewers, but the more they grow, the more powerful they become.

Ad campaigns move at a faster pace. More importantly, they have a beginning and an end. You rent a chance to get some attention for a few months, then you see whether you moved the needle.

Since advertising people often get responsibility for social elements of marketing, this creates a fundamental disconnect. Marketers who tap into these two forms of communication can get whipsawed – the social builds too slowly, and the campaign ends too quickly, to make it easy to synchronize them. Even when they do succeed, there’s huge waste. If you’ve assembled 100,000 customers into a community behind your brand, what happens when you’re done with them? Send them a thank you email and say good bye? That’s a tragic waste.

The answer, as my colleague, Sean Corcoran, discovered in the research behind his report “Using Social Applications In Ad Campaigns”, means thinking of social fans as an asset that you can build with a campaign and then tap over and over again. To do this, you must also make sure you connect with and feed them between campaigns, to keep them interested.

Read the rest of Josh’s post over at the Groundswell blog

The purchase funnel has always been one of the main tenets of marketing theory.

We’ve intuitively known for while that it no longer holds true (if it ever did), but despite many attempts, we’ve had nothing come along that’s replaced it. For example, Forrester had a go a couple of years ago with the diagram below, but crucially it failed to provide a model that was easy to visualise, and it failed to catch on (surprisingly, neither did Giles Rhys Jones’ simpler alternative).

Now, finally, we have a viable alternative model, along with the science to back it up. McKinsey have conducted a study examining the purchase decisions of almost 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents, and come up with what they call the consumer decision journey:

The funnel concept fails to capture all the touch points and key buying factors resulting from the explosion of product choices and digital channels, coupled with the emergence of an increasingly discerning, well-informed consumer. A more sophisticated approach is required to help marketers navigate this environment, which is less linear and more complicated than the funnel suggests. We call this approach the consumer decision journey.

Because of the shift away from one-way communication — from marketers to consumers — toward a two-way conversation, marketers need a more systematic way to satisfy customer demands and manage word-of-mouth.

We hate the word ‘consumer’ (we are all people as far as We Are Social is concerned), but that doesn’t make their model any less valid. David Court, Director of McKinsey’s global Marketing & Sales practice, has an excellent presentation that explains the research and what it means for marketers. The most salient parts being:

You have a trigger of some sort, where people start across the decision journey — they are now going to move towards purchase. The first stage is initial consideration. In many industries, people actually start in their initial consideration of a brand with a relatively narrow list, we believe because of the busy lives and bombardment of media — it’s just very difficult to get through all this clutter in this consumers initial consideration set. However, once the consumer decides they are going to buy a product, they move into a stage that we call active evaluation. It is here that the number of brands they are considering increases. Which is exactly the opposite of the premise of the funnel, going from broad to narrow. This is the stage when the consumer is intent on purchasing and they are actively researching the product.

What marketers should know
The most important thing for marketers to do is to make sure that their marketing activities are aligned against how their consumers research and buy products [...] companies need to look at their messaging in light of where they have the greatest opportunity. For example, companies’ messaging is all about trying to get into the initial consideration set, and yet, when the consumer reaches out during their active evaluation stage, they’re not providing the right facts and testimonials that the consumer is looking for [...] most companies are going to have to make fundamental investment in what we would call consumer driven marketing

Consumer versus company driven touchpoints
We analytically looked at which touchpoints were most influencing the consumer’s decision. We found two types — company driven versus consumer driven. In consumer driven, the consumer is reaching out to get information — they’re talking to their friends, doing internet searches, seeing what’s said on third party sites.

In the initial consideration it was still very much still company driven — the advertising was a very critical part of the touch points that influenced the consumer. However, when we got into active evaluation, two thirds of the influence of those most powerful touchpoints were from consumer driven touchpoints — word of mouth, talking to friends and family, searching on the internet.

And that is a very big change — you need to develop ways for people to talk about your product, so that word of mouth works. Be represented on independent internet sites where people will go and research and buy products. Because, if you don’t have enough presence on those types of consumer driven approaches, when the consumer is reaching out during active evaluation, you’re not there for them to find.

Amen to that…

Forrester have just released a new research report called looking at how companies should organise to best deal with social media, which as well as giving the data above, answers the questions “Which roles do we need” and “Which department is in charge”.

They recommend that the best approach to organising for social media is for companies to form “a cross functional team that includes representatives from different departments and groups and is responsible for social media strategy and implementation” – which we agree with. Social media crosses all organisational boundaries, and as we said back in January, the most effective engagements tend to be when we’re working with a combination of the Marketing, PR, Customer Service and Research departments.

Their executive summary reads:

The biggest challenge brands often have to overcome isn’t technology but managing cultural change within the enterprise. With an ever-increasing number of brands engaging in social media marketing in recent years, companies need to not only be properly budgeted but also well organized. Once brands experiment with social activities, they must then organize from the inside out — or risk not properly staffing or responding to customers. Brands need to integrate social into their companies by developing a safe place for employees to experiment, creating a process to manage and measure these programs, and integrating social into other marketing and enterprise systems. Above all, brands must organize their companies in the hub-and-spoke model [a cross functional team], which allows business units to be flexible with their social programs — but provides a grounded center that enables the company to act efficiently.

Update: David Armano asks Is The Hub And Spoke Model Adaptable?

The Engagement Spectrum, a useful new diagram from our friend David Armano. A nice complement to Mike Troiano’s concept of concept of ‘scalable intimacy’.

Marketing carried a piece this week looking at whether brands should advertise in people’s Twitter streams, prompted by the appearance of ‘services’ like Magpie and adCause. Clearly, the short answer is no, but if you want the long answer:

Robin Grant, the managing director of social media agency We Are Social, warns against brands jumping in feet first. ‘Twitter is all about conversations and what these ad networks are trying to do is insert ads into that conversation stream which is inherently inappropriate,’ he says adding he won’t be advising any clients to advertise within Twitter streams.

Let me know if you think I’m being a little too simplistic…

Update: So perhaps I was being a little too simplistic – it’s worth reading Brian Morrissey’s thoughts on the subject.

Update 2: ReadWriteWeb looks into some use cases of Magpie (in a fairly negative light) and Graeme Wood follows up pointing out that, without disclosure, this sort of advertising may be illegal under UK and EU law…