This week we’re kicking off what we plan to make a semi-regular feature for your Monday afternoons on the We Are Social blog. A quick round up of research, news and case studies that caught our eye over the last week and we thought were worth sharing.

Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?
New research released from Nielsen suggests that social media is starting to become the primary vehicle for content discovery:

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? …In a nutshell, there is a segment of the online population that uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure.

‘Socializers’ (i.e. those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media) cite too much information on the web as one of the main reasons why they turn social media in order to hunt for information.

The study found that these socializers actually use social media as a filtration tool, trusting recommendations and content from their friends and family to wade through the sheer volume of information out there.

Marta Strickland asks some interesting questions about the research which are well worth reading.

How should Neal’s Yard Remedies have responded to comments?
PR Week revisited the Neil’s Yard debacle from May, where an explosion of critical comments for the company on the Guardian’s ‘You Ask They Answer’ series were left unanswered when critics began to grill the company on its homeopathic remedy, and not ‘organic skincare’ as they believed.

Is it realistic to expect to be able to put boundaries around online discussion? Should Neal’s Yard have never taken part in the first place?

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter
Recent findings from the latest report from the Pew Internet and Internet Life Project demonstrated that the median age of users across several social networks has been changing over the last year:

Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace’s is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and… Facebook is 33.

Despite past reports to the contrary, Generation Y now also appears to be moving to Twitter in great number. In fact they’ve more than double their numbers: “37% of those 18-24 now use Twitter when only 19% did back in December 2008.”

Twitter – Retweet Limited Rollout
Last week, Twitter announced that they have activated the retweet button on a small number of accounts. Though its long been possible to retweet posts using third party applications such as Tweetdeck, it hasn’t been possible to forward particularly interesting tweets to your followers through the web interface. According to Twitter:

The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we’ll know right away. If things look good, we’ll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.

This move is another step by Twitter, who a just over a weeks ago released their ‘Lists’ feature, to improving the web interface in order to make things easier and more efficient for users.

FEED: The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report
Razorfish published their Digital Brand Experience Report today, which surveyed 1,000 ‘connected consumers’ about how the web affected the way they engage with brands and make buying decisions. As you might expect, the research revealed that digital technology is indeed altering consumer attitudes. Some key findings:

• Consumers are largely engaging with brands to receive exclusive promotions or discounts and of those who follow a brand on Twitter, 44% say that access to good deals is the main reason.
• 65% of consumers say a digital experience, either positive or negative, changed their opinion of a brand. And in that group, almost all (97%) indicated their experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased that brand.
• People who actively engage with a brand digitally–from participating in a contest to downloading a mobile application–are substantially more inclined to purchase and recommend that brand to others.

The full PDF is available for download, along with a pack of charts.

Back in 2005, as I was first experimenting with social media with my personal blog, I was convinced that I was pioneering social media usage within my network of friends, family and colleagues. Looking back now, I realise my younger sister had actually started using social media a few months before me. At the time she was pregnant with her first child and I remember her mentioning she wasn’t sure how she would have got through her pregnancy had it not been for the Internet and the community of supportive mums she found there. Of course, at the time, I hadn’t put a name to what was to become a few years later one of the fastest growing social media phenomenons: the “connected mums” or “digital mums”.

A recent survey conducted by parenting site BabyCenter found that the use of social networks by mums has grown from 11% in 2006 to 63% in 2009. Mums increasingly use social networks to search for information related to pregnancy, to find tips and information on parenting, and to get recommendations from other mums.

More recent research by Forrester highlights that the Internet is the main source of information for mothers when it comes to making an informed purchase decision. Even more interestingly, one of the findings is that although they spend a considerable amount of time online, mums don’t tend to trust banner ads or search engine ads.

You can see where I’m getting at: if you’re a brand willing to engage with a group of individuals who have less time to spend with media than the average consumer (32 hours per week versus 36 hours), see the Internet as their main source of information, but don’t trust online advertising, and are noticeable users of social networks (31%), surely social media is the answer?

The Forrester research also found that 25% of mothers read customer reviews online, 19% use comparison sites and last but not least, 50% tell their friends about products they’re interested in. Online word of mouth at its best.

As Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of popular UK mums network NetMums puts it:

Mums are a desirable target for many advertisers [...] but please don’t be tempted to patronise us with fluffy nursery-rhyme adverts. If you want to impress us, remember that as well as being mums, we are grown up, intelligent women.

Sites like Netmums, BabyExpert.com or Bounty.co.uk are all very appealing for marketers, but don’t forget, it’s all about engaging in conversations with mums in an interesting (Susanna Scott, the founder of British Mummy Bloggers reports she receives 10 product pitches per week) & ethical manner.

The hype around Twitter doesn’t seem to be slowing down, however few research papers have been published so far about it. So it’s with a gleeful smile that I welcomed the results of the academic study of the phenomenon published by Professor Jim Jansen and his team at Penn State University. They analysed nearly 150,000 tweets to understand how brands were mentioned on microblogging tools like Twitter.

I will focus this post on the results, but feel free to check for yourselves the methods that have been used, they’re very well detailed in the report paper.

Around 19% of tweets mention an organization or a product. Of these:

• 1 out 5 tweets express a sentiment or an opinion, either positive (for 52% of them), negative (33%) or neutral (15%)
• 4 out of 5 tweets are not associated with a sentiment, they are mostly questions and answers. People are seeking details missing from their usual source of information and helping others with their findings.

This latest data is additional proof that brands and products are at the heart of online conversations. Conversation strategies are a requirement for brands and it should be part of an overall strategy. A conversation strategy can be used, for example, to understand why a product is more popular than another, and what could be improved as far as service and customer relationship are concerned. It might also help to discover a problem with a product already on the market and identify what remedy could be taken; users generally have very insightful inputs that should be taken into account.

Listening and responding are even more important, in that they help brands greatly when they want to start a conversation with their customers, or any other people out there.

If most of the tweets about a brand are questions, brands themselves can provide fast and reliable information, which I have no doubt will have a positive impact on the prospect/brand relationship, and then on the client/brand relationship. That’s what Robin was saying when he explained that it was important to “engage in conversations in social media”

Furthermore, the study shows that there can be a massive swing in sentiment from a studied period to another.

It’s probably obvious to all of you who are reading this, but conversations need constant monitoring, whether they happen on Twitter or elsewhere. It doesn’t stop at weekends: buying patterns and therefore exposure to corporate messages evolve constantly, and the strength of a brand is its ability to identify these variations and adapt to them. When We Are Social work on conversation audits for our clients, we often analyse the reactions of individuals to a brand at a precise moment, for example after the launch of a new TV ad campaign.

With the rise of microblogging, clients and individuals are exposed to a constant stream of information and opinions and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. These are rarely monitored by brands, so it’s high time for them to have a look and engage!

Hot on the heels of Wave 4 of Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker, Forrester have just published their third annual Social Technographics Profile.

The exact stats vary, of course, but both studies confirm the overall trend of higher numbers of internet users spending an increasing amount of time in social media environments. The Forrester blog mainly comments on the landscape in North America, however Forrester’s Rebecca Jennings has a separate report looking at Europe. She notes in this excerpt:

Online European usage of social networks such as Facebook and Bebo has grown significantly — around 30% now engage with social networks regularly, up from 18% last year. Overall, more than 60% of online Europeans now engage with social media on a regular basis.

The Wave 4 Social Media Tracker report shows an increase in most types of social media activity, as the graphic excerpt below indicates:

The rapid growth in some types of activity has slowed as many markets reach saturation point, though there’s no specific stats for microblogging, or of bulletin board usage, which is heavy in many Asian markets.

Apparently we’re all uploading fewer video clips, though looking at the country spotlights, this seems to be based on a decline in the UK, Germany and Korea – emphasising how important it is to  consider local market differences when developing a social media engagement strategy.

However I’m not convinced this is a long term trend: as video-capable devices and mobile internet usage proliferates, it’s becoming easier to upload, not less (the quality of these uploads is another matter). Could it be the case that some respondents under-reported their uploading habits? What do you think about these stats?

Is Social Media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

From Socialnomics, where there are references for all of the stats used in the video.

So, here’s the big one, does spending on social media really pay back? A fresh MBA graduate from MIT, Niki Gomez, passing through London and We Are Social on her way to Mumbai, gives her views.

At last, a study quantifies what many of us felt must be true, that social media does translate into increased sales. As Violette mentioned last week, a study by Wetpaint and Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group shows an extremely strong correlation between engaging in different social media and earning higher revenues. The study looks at the engagement of top 100 brands from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands report and ranks them from 1 to 127, based on how they use social media channels. It finds that the top brands with their rankings in brackets are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The most engaged brands experienced revenue growth in 2008 of 18% whilst the least engaged brands experienced losses of negative 6% over the same period.

Also interesting is that only arguably half of these are internet companies. The study categorizes the brands, a la Malcolm Gladwell, into mavens, those heavily engaging in 7 or more channels, such as Starbucks and Dell; butterflies, such as American Express and Hyundai who engage with seven channels but with less engagement; selectives who engage in six or less but do some on a deep level such as H&M and Philips; wallflowers like BP and McDonalds who engage with six or less but with a light touch. My question was whether social media pays off because of lower marketing spend, as there is a shift from spending on more traditional channels. However it seems, revenues, actual sales are up on previous years, even boom times!

Their findings conclude that it is not how many social media channels you use, but how deep that engagement is: so being social pays, but it’s the quality rather than quantity of these conversations that seems to triumph yet again. So, please think before you tweet… a good piece of advice for brands and individuals alike.

With all the talk of teenagers’ online habits in the news, we got our most knowledgeable man in to blog on the matter. 17 year old Adam Bernstein is an A-level student currently on work experience with We Are Social, and here are his thoughts.

It’s been the buzz of the social media sphere this week: how Matthew Robson, a 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley, had written a report which had shocked and dazzled city bosses in equal measure.

The trouble is, as another teenager – admittedly a slightly older one – Robson’s arguments do not hold true. There is much value in Robson’s report – it does provide an interesting insight into how one particular teenager consumes media. But there is a danger in taking isolated examples and extrapolating them to be indicative of society.

Robson’s report is supposed to be focussed on the teen market, yet too often he ignores important economic & social factors. For example, the argument that teenagers don’t buy newspapers because they’re too expensive is an interesting one. But this argument is based on one assumption which underscores Robson’s entire report: teenagers are independent of their parents. But this simply isn’t the case – most people I know who do read a newspaper read it because it’s in the house. Teenagers probably wouldn’t pay 80p a day for a newspaper but it’s not an issue because in many cases they don’t have to.

If Robson wanted to know the real reason teenagers don’t read newspapers, it is more about content. Teenagers will consistently have their lifestyle treated with derision in the papers; but how often will a viable alternative be offered? With the continual damning of teens in the papers, it’s no wonder teenagers don’t read them.

But it was Robson’s claims about Twitter which were the most ignorant: “Twitter is pointless to teens” screamed the headlines. It’s true to say that teens (on the whole) don’t use Twitter but his fixation on the costs of texting missed a crucial point: only 5% of Tweets are made via SMS – the success of applications such as Tweetdeck and Twitterfox show how it is really used.

The reality is that teens don’t use Twitter because of demographics: to make a broad – and somewhat unfair – generalisation, teenagers use Facebook, whereas Twitter is used by older people. Essentially, teens follow other teens so it’s inevitable that most of the age-group stays away from Twitter. Twitter’s relevance to the younger market is diminished because many perceive a ‘tweet’ as being the same as a Facebook Status Update – they don’t see the need for both.

Robson’s report is useful for the many truths it does contain: Teenagers doing all they can to avoid advertising is an important point which the ad companies will be trying hard to counteract. But Robson’s suggestion that teenagers are motivated above all by cost is a spurious one: teenage consumption of media probably does have something to do with money; but most teens don’t have a full-time job, many are in full-time education and are supported by their parents – it is they who pay for everything so his argument that costs are the most important thing to teens is wrong.

But, as Suw Charman-Anderson notes, the main problem with Robson’s report is that he thinks his experiences are emblematic of teenagers as a whole. The reality is that there is much greater diversity in the teen market than Robson suggests. Teenagers are an eclectic bunch – and Robson would do well to remember this.

Update: I’ve just come across an interesting report by Forrester about this exact topic (for those interested in US rather than UK data, there’s also a good presentation from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Nielsen’s recent How Teens Use Media report). Robson’s argument that all teenagers are always listening to music, particularly free online music, is kicked into touch:

With its findings suggesting socio-economic factors are unimportant in how teenagers consume media, Robson’s arguments that costs are the primary factor in deciding what teens do is shown to be false.

But what is most interesting for companies is that teenagers are using social media for the same reasons as the population as a whole. Possibly this means they don’t need tailored advertising; more probably, it means that in time teenagers will drift over to Twitter – Facebook was originally intended for Harvard University students yet is now used worldwide.

Having said all of this, the accuracy of the report does have to be considered – speaking to 261 13-19 year olds and making assumptions that this data covers society as a whole is questionable. But at least it’s more accurate than Robson’s report which was simply the findings of one person.

Update 2: Dubit have also added some stats into the mix with their How UK Youth Really Consume Media Report: Newspapers & Magazines and Twitter

Nielsen’s latest Global Online Consumer Survey confirms that people trust other people more than they trust advertising. As Jonathan Carson explains on the Nielsen blog:

The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly.

It’s not surprising that people trust the opinions of people they already know – it’s why word of mouth marketing is so powerful. But as the graph below shows, the trust in online word of mouth is significant. Globally, 70% of people trust consumer opinions posted online, and the same proportion trust a brand’s own website.

Good news for those who are investing in websites? Well, when you consider the ways that sites often try to drive traffic, you’ll notice these types of activity appear very low down the list.

It’s quite striking that online word of mouth acheives much higher trust than all other online-specifc activity. Opt-in emails (also known as ‘bacn’) are only trusted by just over half of us, and only one third of people trusting online banner advertising – though average click-through rates (0.1% in the US according to Doubleclick) indicate how successful they are at delivering people to their intended destination.

We’ve been building websites that allow consumer opinions to be posted (also known as blogs!) for some of our clients, as well as helping to increase online conversations about them, so we’re pleased to see even more evidence from Nielsen that this is a valuable thing to do.

It was April when Hitwise last released stats on Twitter’s growth in the UK. Yesterday, Robin Goad published the chart above showing Twitter’s continuing rise and had this to say:

Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about. The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it – 93% in fact – has occurred during 2009. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications were included, the numbers could be even higher.

He goes on to look in detail at where traffic from Twitter goes, pointing out that 55.9% is sent to content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites – a very different profile to Google for example.

On the same day, the Guardian’s Charles Arthur penned this:

Blogging is dying. Actually, no, let me qualify that. The long tail of blogging is dying. I say this with confidence [...] Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter.

He backs this up with evidence of his own – which I have to say matches my intuition into what is happening:

More and more of the feeds I follow [haven't been updated for 2 months]. Why? Because blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning. Facebook’s success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can’t index it to see who’s talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

So what does this mean for brands? Well, as Charles points out, people are still reading blogs and we would have always have recommended talking to those in the short head (which is still pretty massive compared to the relative scarcity of conventional media) – i.e. those having engaging conversations with the large communities following them. It’s also essential to remember that unlike the transient nature of Twitter and the great walled garden of Facebook, blog posts are effectively conversations that are eternally visible through Google, meaning they have more inherent value to brands.

The fact to note here is that some of the creators (in Forrester’s terms) have moved from blogging to creation in other forms of social media, and this should not be ignored. Your social media strategy should never rest on blogs alone (just as it shouldn’t on any other part of social media) – you should be experimenting with Twitter, Facebook and other channels – and your strategy should be driven by your business objectives, where your target audience spends their time and where you can be most effective.

Of course it’s not just your strategy but the also the way you conduct yourself that counts (as Habitat discovered to their cost this week) – as Robin concludes:

The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.

Although we’d probably put it differently, we agree. Success with Twitter, like the rest of social media, is not about mechanistically shouting at strangers, it’s about being human – making friends and having conversations with them.