Social media and ecommerce have evolved since 1-800-FLOWERS launched the first Facebook storefront in July 2009. Internet users have become more comfortable with online buying on Facebook as they spend more time on the site.

“It is not surprising that shopping and socializing—activities that complement each other in the real world—are beginning to converge online as well,” said Krista Garcia, eMarketer analyst and author of the new report, “Facebook Commerce: Reaching Shoppers Where They Socialize.” “As social media, and Facebook in particular, plays a larger role in consumers’ lives, people are becoming accustomed to performing routine tasks like reading news, watching videos and listening to music, as well as discovering products and shopping, all while staying logged in to a single site. Instead of compartmentalizing daily routines, social media users are treating Facebook as a one-stop platform.”

Retailers are still in the early stages of using social media as a sales vehicle, but the channel is poised for growth. Booz & Company estimated that $1 billion in goods would be sold through social media in the US in 2011. That figure is expected to triple in 2012 and reach $14 billion by 2015.

While social commerce still represents a tiny percentage of overall retail sales, and Facebook is just one social site, that site is the clear leader and already offers retailers a variety of options for converting users into consumers. Some of those consumers are warming to the idea of buying products and services while on the site.

In a Q4 2011 Oracle survey of North American internet users, nearly one in five respondents said they would buy through Facebook or had already done so, while 15% were not aware they had the option. Approximately a third said they would never purchase products via Facebook, however.
 

“Facebook’s role in ecommerce is currently in flux,” said Garcia. “Brands are beginning to realize its capabilities, while users are growing accustomed to mingling with companies online and sharing shopping activities with friends. Even though social media is still more of a marketing tool than a sales vehicle, Facebook’s influence on shopping behavior extends beyond triggering conversions on the spot.”

Source: eMarketer

Companies often have several different accounts or pages on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. As these accounts and the interactions with customers on social media increase, program managers must learn to balance the influx and continue to interact with fans.

The Altimeter Group surveyed social media program managers in Q2 2011 and found that, on average, companies owned 178 total social media accounts, not including individual employee accounts. This includes an average of 39.2 Twitter accounts, 31.9 blogs and 29.9 Facebook accounts. Forums and message boards were more popular than YouTube, with an average of 23.4 accounts per company, compared to YouTube’s 9.4.

This can be a challenge for a company, as it is harder to oversee and manage that many accounts throughout the enterprise. Companies often have different accounts or blogs for different departments or regions, and integrating their outreach with the same style, tone and guidelines is difficult.

Another challenge is how companies will manage the increase in customer conversations taking place on these various platforms, as users turn more often to social media for brand connections. Monitoring several social networks, different accounts and pages, and responding to comments take time and resources.

Of the social media program managers surveyed, 59% said they will streamline the internal processes for handling social media conversations, 44% want to empower the crowd to respond to each other and 33% will streamline with new technologies. But nearly as many did not know how they would respond to an increase in customer conversations online.

Coordinating across various social media accounts is important for a company, as it allows a team or individual to manage, simplify and improve the social media process. Additionally, educating employees and developing internal processes and guidelines are also helpful.

London: Social networking site Twitter was out of action for over an hour in Britain after it was overloaded with New Year messages.

The site crashed around 3 p.m. Saturday. It coincided with midnight celebrations in Japan when revellers were sending a record 16,197 tweets per second, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

The overload meant no one could post new messages or read existing ones. Instead, frustrated users were greeted with the error message: "Twitter is over capacity."

The site returned to working order but then stopped on several other occasions, prompting speculation that it was being hit by the arrival of New Year in different parts of the world.

The meltdown happened as the world welcomed in 2012, a year of historic importance for Britain, with the Olympics, the Paralympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee set to be defining moments.

Up to 250,000 people poured into Central London, some in Trafalgar Square and others watching the pyrotechnics centred on the London Eye, the Mail said.

In Tokyo, people released helium balloons in front of the Tokyo Tower at midnight with notes attached listing their hopes for 2012. Many wished for a better year, following the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the newspaper added.

London: Google's social networking site Google Plus will have more than 400 million users by the end of 2012, a researcher has said.

The website that went public in September has passed the 62 million mark, the Daily Mail said.

American analyst Paul Allen has said 625,000 members were signing up every day, and the number would rapidly increase because 700,000 Android devices are being bought every day.

"Based on the accelerated growth I'm seeing and all the dials and levers Google can still utilise, and the developer ecosystem that will be developed, I predict that 2012 is going to be a breakout year for Google Plus and that it will end next year with more than 400 million users," Allen was quoted as saying.

Google Plus' rival Facebook has 800 million users.

The daily said Allen's methodology was not based on actual figures and could be described as a guess.

The Global Web Index last week announced that Google Plus actually has 150 million active users, more than double of Allen's estimate.

Sunnyvale: Yahoo! Inc, the premier digital media company, today announced it has extended the Facebook integration launched at f8 in September, the news activity feature, to 26 additional Yahoo! sites worldwide, including U.S.-based entertainment experiences omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games.

A new social feature, Notifications, has also launched in the U.S., alerting people to social conversations and activity across Yahoo!. The extension of these features is designed to bring a deeply personalized, social news experience to more of the content millions of people come to Yahoo! to read each day.

Since launching the Yahoo! News friends' activity feature, more than 12 million people have opted in, increasing referrals from Facebook to Yahoo! News and bringing a younger (ages 18—34) audience of socially engaged people1 to the No. 1 online news destination.2

"As the world's most popular online news destination, Yahoo! News delivers the most compelling content on the Web through a combination of local editors, advanced technologies, and now, your friends," said Blake Irving, chief product officer, Yahoo!. "In just three months, we've seen traffic from Facebook to Yahoo! News in the U.S. increase by 300%, so we're excited to extend this social activation to more of our worldwide content sites."

The extension of the news activity feature to more Yahoo! sites around the world lets people discover and connect around the news, entertainment, and information they are enjoying on Yahoo! through updates on Facebook. A straightforward opt-in process launches people into the immersive social experience:

Control What You Share — By opting-in to the new feature, people can easily show what they're reading on Yahoo! with their Facebook friends. People's activity will be featured on their Facebook profiles as it happens. It's easy to turn it on and off and delete items.
View Your Friends' Activity — A new "facebar" at the top of integrated Yahoo! pages shows a person's Facebook friends and what they're reading on Yahoo!.
Notifications across Yahoo! (U.S. only)

A new social feature, Notifications, builds upon the Yahoo! News friends' activity feature and further encourages social discovery and navigation of content through the lens of people's friends. The Notifications feature alerts people to social conversations and other activity on Yahoo! that interest them such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, and stock alerts. Notifications is found on the top of most pages on Yahoo!, such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, omg!, Shine, and Yahoo! Travel.

Online retailers, as well as other publisher sites that want to encourage visitors to register and sign in as a way to gain information about them, would do well to consider social sign-on, which allows internet users to carry a login from Facebook, Twitter, Google or a similar site elsewhere on the web without having to fill out forms and go through the hassle of a full registration process at each site they use.

Research has shown that making the registration process easier, and giving users options for signing in with any of several different logins, increases sign-ups and conversions. And Facebook, with its massive reach, has become the leading choice for users.

An October 2011 study from social retail recommendations service provider Sociable Labs found that at any given time around half of all visitors to US ecommerce sites are already logged in to Facebook. They may not be using their Facebook login to tie their interests, activities and social graph back into the retailer’s recommendation algorithms—yet—but they are active members of the social networking giant who are currently logged in on the same computer.
 

And among social network users worldwide, nearly half chose Facebook in a Janrain poll about which social ID they prefer when signing on to retailer sites. That’s higher than the average for signing in to all types of sites across the web, for which 42% of respondents preferred Facebook. It’s also an increase over time for retailers: In Q1 2010, around 40% of social network users worldwide used their Facebook ID to sign in to ecommerce sites.

Fortunately for retailers, a Facebook login carries a wealth of information with it. Alternative login choices such as Twitter might carry with them only a name and the ability to share information about purchases socially. But Facebook will carry over a user’s interests, connections and other vital elements of the social graph, giving retailers the opportunity to create better, more personalized recommendations based on a preexisting login.

Source:eMarketer

Social media is becoming an important part of business around the world, and companies in many regions are planning to increase their use of it in the coming months.

For its “International Business Report,” Grant Thornton LLP spoke to senior executives from across the globe in August and September 2011 to determine how their companies used social media.

Companies in Latin America were the most likely to use social media, as 53% of respondents there said their companies currently do so and 78% said they planned to increase its use. Businesses in countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and those in Nordic countries also planned to increase social media use in the coming months, at 75% and 72% of respondents, respectively, according to the Grant Thornton report. Comparatively, 47% of companies in North American countries currently use social media and 60% planned to increase use.

As emerging markets grow economically and internet access becomes more widely available in their countries, companies in Latin America and the BRIC nations—Brazil, Russia, Indian and China—are leveraging social media to reach their target audiences.

Meanwhile, businesses in Europe “are understandably preoccupied with the current economic difficulties, but they shouldn’t lose sight of the longer term opportunities social media offers,” said Mark Henshaw, head of media and entertainment at Grant Thornton UK, in a statement about the survey.

Communicating with customers is only one way companies worldwide are using social media. Overall, 53% of respondents used social media for advertising, 51% used it to communicate with customers and 43% leveraged social media for recruitment.

As emerging markets and regions beyond North America embrace social media and increase their marketing outreach on these channels, look for Latin American, BRIC and ASEAN countries to take a leadership role going forward.

Source:eMarketer

Internet users flock to social media networks to stay in touch with friends and family by sharing messages, photos and more. But when it comes to sharing personal information on these public sites, users expect to be able to share privately with their friends and circles.

A study from online sharing platform Posterous conducted by Harris Interactive found the majority of US social network users felt family and personal photos were for private sharing. Expectations for privately sharing status updates and photos of friends were slightly more lenient.

Expectations vary slightly across social networking sites, however; users were typically less demanding of privacy on Facebook compared to other sites, such as Google+. One reason for the slight difference could be the familiarity of Facebook compared to a newer site like Google+ that users are still learning how to operate. In addition, Google+ in particular was billed as the answer to selective sharing, with its Circles highlighted much more strongly than Facebook’s analogous features.

Elements that Are Important to Share Privately Online According to US Social Network Users, by Social Network, Oct 2011 (% of respondents)

Additional findings from an October 2011 USA Today and Gallup Poll support the theory that site familiarity and usage might relate to a user’s comfort for their privacy. For instance, 39% of US Facebook users who used the social networking site less than once a week were very concerned about their privacy, compared to only 26% of users who logged in daily.

US Facebook Users Who Are "Very Concerned" with Privacy on Facebook, by Frequency of Use, Oct 2011 (% of respondents)

One possibility is that greater privacy concerns lead to less frequent use of these social networking sites—or that greater usage leads to greater familiarity and comfort.

But one should not mistake comfort with online privacy on sites such as Facebook for an understanding of privacy controls. In regard to how well US social network users believe they understand Facebook’s privacy settings, Posterous found less than a third (32%) felt they had a complete understanding of such controls.

US Facebook Users Who Feel They Completely Understand Facebook

Clearly, there is room to grow here, but data from National Security Cyber Alliance (NSCA) and McAfee found 21% of US internet users were either unsure of when they last changed their social network privacy and security settings or admitted to having never done so. In comparison, 44% said they had updated their settings within the last month or last week.

Last Time US Internet Users Changed Their Social Network Privacy and Security Account Settings, Nov 2011 (% of respondents)

NCSA and McAfee also found 46% of respondents said they had altered their social media network usage in response to security concerns, whereas 50% said they had not. It is worth watching these percentages closely in the coming months as the online privacy debate continues to heat up, likely forcing social networks to become more transparent about their privacy settings.

Source:eMarketer

At Ogilvy & Mather, Irfan Kamal is responsible for helping clients execute digital marketing programs that meet business goals. As senior vice president for digital/social strategy, he has led research initiatives designed to measure the sales impact of social media marketing.

In a conversation with eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, Kamal discussed why focusing on business metrics is crucial in social media marketing, how companies can move away from metrics such as fan count, and why it’s important to understand how social media contributes to customer purchase decisions.

Why is measuring success in social media marketing so hard?

Irfan Kamal: We expect social media to be like other media that we’ve measured in the past. That leads to thinking that probably doesn’t take full advantage of the full set of measurable metrics within social media.

Another aspect is that we are measuring just because we can measure, instead of measuring what we need to measure. So the metrics that are easy to measure are the ones that end up getting measured, vs. the ones that really would be useful in understanding business impact.

“The metrics that are easy to measure are the ones that end up getting measured, vs. the ones that really would be useful in understanding business impact.”

 What should companies measure?

Kamal: Our philosophy is that we need to measure metrics that are related to business value. Does social media change brand perception? Does it increase consideration? Does it drive actual sales for the brand? Those are difficult questions, and they require new ways of measuring and tracking, and that makes it challenging.

What often gets measured instead are what we call diagnostic or optimization metrics—the number of Facebook fans, the Twitter follower base, the size of a group or a message board or a LinkedIn group. All the metrics that are easily visible are the ones that end up getting measured most often.

The problem is that it’s unclear whether there is a direct relationship between these metrics and genuine business value. What we are trying to do is go the next step and understand first, what is the relationship between the metrics we can measure and business value, and second, if we can find a good relationship, what are the metrics that we should be measuring for business value?

Do you think that the sophistication of social media measurement is where it should be, or is it falling behind where marketers need it to be?

Kamal: Any new field has a lot of chaos when it’s getting started, and that’s the same for social media as it was for digital media in general. It’s not unexpected that there’s a lot of discussion about metrics. But we have gotten to the point where brands and companies are making decisions on whether to increase investment in a channel that is receiving a huge amount of consumer attention. It’s very important to start to move toward measuring in a better, more business value-focused way.

I think that slowly we’re seeing the ability to start measuring some of those things. Some of the social media heavyweights are starting to develop better measurement capabilities, and I think that’s tremendously important to advancing the ability to allocate investment dollars.

“Some of the social media heavyweights are starting to develop better measurement capabilities, and I think that’s tremendously important to advancing the ability to allocate investment dollars.”

How do we move away from measuring what’s easy to measure, and toward measuring what actually contributes to business value?

Kamal: Companies need to develop tools and analytics to better measure some of the business-focused metrics. We are starting to see some technology like that. Facebook has a couple of partnerships with analytics companies that allow for deeper testing and measurement of the impact of, at least, their paid advertising programs, and I think that is becoming helpful. And we’re seeing other companies that are developing the ability to embed tracking and surveys and analytics tracking within custom tabs on Facebook, as an example, that allow for deeper tracking and measurement of people’s exposure to certain types of content.

I do think there’s a lot more to be done. There are very robust social media discussions on blogs, on message boards, on Twitter and other emerging media, like Google+. And we need to have better tools to allow for measurement around business goals in a way that allows you to track people who are exposed and who aren’t exposed.

Social media measurement can be expensive, especially if you’re working with outside vendors. Is it still possible to use free tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure social media?

Kamal: Our clients’ marketing programs have varying levels of budget. A big part of what we do is try to figure out the best way to measure within specific budgets, and not all programs allow for really expensive measurement tool integration. Existing tools such as TweetReach and Google Analytics offer ways to measure things like reach relatively well.

I do think that the more complex measurements, such as the impact on brand perception or sales that are indirectly driven by social media, are important to measure, but they are somewhat more expensive to measure. It would be great if some of the social media companies realized the importance and made these measurement capabilities more accessible to a wide variety of companies, from small businesses through to the largest brands.

Do marketers focus more on their social media marketing activities than they do on measuring the results?

Kamal: We definitely have some clients that are spending more on measurement. To the extent that budgets increase—and we see them continuing to increase because of the consumer attention focused on the media—more money is starting to get spent on measurement. And that tends to be led by some of our most measurement-focused clients, our larger brands that have always measured the quality of, or the effectiveness of, programs.

And then it’s starting to spread to other clients that perhaps haven’t found the need to measure as much in the past, but are being challenged because of questions around what happens next. They’ve hit their easily measurable goals, such as fan-base size, but now they’re perplexed about what to do next.

I think that the next steps become much clearer when you can measure clearly what is working and what isn’t.

It’s not a new point, certainly, that there’s been too much focus on collecting fans and followers, and not enough focus on what to actually do with these people.

Kamal: Yes. And one of the next horizons we see is that with better measurement you can really understand how to create incredibly impactful programs that not only acquire fans and followers and customer advocates, but also engage them in a way that drives value.

“One of the next horizons we see is that with better measurement you can really understand how to create incredibly impactful programs that not only acquire fans and followers and customer advocates, but also engage them in a way that drives value.”

Brands are starting to realize that they need to figure out how to engage to drive business value. And I think the way to do that is to really implement some very granular, very specific measurement-focused initiatives.

What’s exciting is that that will make social media programs smarter, more entertaining, more informative, and more useful to both consumers and to brands, because if you’re looking at a goal that’s around core business value, that’s typically something that helps both the brand and the consumer. So it’s going to be interesting to see the next level of engagement campaigns that come out of this.

Irfan Kamal ,Senior Vice President, Digital/Social Strategy,Ogilvy & Mather

Source:eMarketer

While advertising and public relations agencies work with client campaigns on social networks, many of these agencies are not taking advantage of advertising for themselves in a social setting.

Digital marketing agency lonelybrand asked senior marketing executives from agencies about their work in social networks and only 17% said their companies currently purchase ads in social networks to assist in digital lead generation.

However, of those companies that do advertise on social networks, many are spending several thousand dollars a month on purchasing ads. Among agencies that purchase advertisements on social networks, 23% said their companies spend more than $10,000 a month on ads. On the other end of the spectrum, 32% spend less than $1,000.

One plus to outreach via social media is that there are options for almost all budgets. Companies can focus on free social media marketing, through Facebook pages or Twitter accounts, but can supplement those tactics with paid advertisements, spending as much or as little—in paid media, at least—as the company prefers.

The lonelybrand data also found that Facebook was the most popular social network for advertising, which is unsurprising given its broad user base. Of all agency respondents, not just those who said they advertise on social networks, 13% said their companies purchase advertising on Facebook, compared to 4% who purchase ads on LinkedIn and 2% on Twitter.

Overall, most companies prefer to focus on marketing on social networks, rather than spending money to advertise. But those that do demonstrate that companies with a wide range of budgets can take advantage of ads to supplement campaigns and generate leads on social sites.

Source:eMarketer