Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

So social media and search engine optimization in China is a whole different ballgame. But an important one to play for any American company that wants a presence in the Middle Kingdom, according to Bin Lee and Iris Huang of Glogou.

“Asians are all social media users,” says Lee. “Social media users in China are way more active than Facebookers and Twitter users — social media is their key outlet.”

Glogou has been helping U.S companies sell into China — a “reverse Alibaba,” the company calls itself — for about five years. In a natural progression, last year the company started to explore helping Western corporations build their online profiles in China in addition to selling their products.

The reasons Western companies could need such a service have to do with the difficulties Western companies can face in China, such as what happened to Apple over the past few months — negative press in government-owned media outlets and coordinated astroturf social media attacks. And of course, reasons such as those behind Google’s exit from the Chinese market. Basically, if the Chinese government doesn’t approve of what you’re doing, you’re not going to be successful in China.

Early detection and response — Apple CEO Tim Cook eventually apologized, probably settling the issues — is critical.

But not all the challenges of doing business in China can be chalked up to political problems. In the Chinese government’s efforts to accomplish its goals — whatever they are — there’s a lot of collateral damage.

Source: John Koetsier

China’s Baidu search engine is very Google, circa 2005

“Many US sites are not accessible from China,” says Huang. “It’s amazing how many … often that’s not because of political reasons, often simply due to technical reasons.”

So Glogou provides site monitoring services based in China, confirming that your site is accessible from mainland China and building you a small Chinese site if it is not. And the company provides social media monitoring: checking Weibo for mentions of your company and brand, and monitoring sentiment. That’s a big deal, because Weibo has more users than Twitter and almost as many users as Facebook.

That is due to the fact that social media is Chinese citizens’ key political outlet, Lee says. While the government does censor certain keywords, posts, and sometimes entire topics — such as the pigs floating in the river in Shanghai, which had two million search results before disappearing entirely — it has to grant a certain level of freedom, he told me. Which makes social media a key outlet for political as well as personal sentiment.

“The official newspapers never criticize the government, so people need to release some negative feelings” Lee says. “They criticize the government via social media.”

But it’s not just about social media — search engine optimization is also key, and SEO is an entirely different matter in China than in the U.S.

“We also help U.S. businesses to make sure they are included on Baidu,” Huang told me. “Because if you’re not on Baidu, you’re basically invisible in China.”

In addition to SEO services, the company has built an English interface for Baidu’s Chinese-language ad platform. Baidu has advertising products roughly analogous to Google’s AdWords and AdSense products, which until now have been almost entirely off-limits to English-speaking users.

China’s an important and growing market for U.S. businesses, a fact that social media management big boy HootSuite recently acknowledged by adding Weibo support to its tools.

Which means knowing what the Chinese think of you and your product is probably a good thing if you’re trying to sell into their country.

photo credit: jonrussell via photopin cc

SocialFlow, a startup that makes social media marketing tools, has raised $10 million in its second round of institutional financing.

Before you finish yawning, take a look at the company’s investors (a bunch of big, shiny VC firms) and its competitors (a bunch of splashy exits and big revenue numbers). You can infer that someone, somewhere, is trying to make his money back and perhaps even offset riskier bets with a safe one on a company that is selling a product to customers that want to buy.

The New York-based startup announced today that the round was led by Fairhaven Capital with participation from existing investors SoftBank Capital, RRE Ventures, AOL Ventures, and Betaworks. New investors in the round included kbs+ Ventures and Rand Capital Corporation.

Like so many other social media products available to businesses and brands, SocialFlow wants to help those high-dollar customers manage their online presences, from starting conversations on Facebook to scheduling tweets to interacting with customers on a one-on-one basis. The platform also includes options for advertising and other paid media on Facebook.

“The best performing tweet The Economist sent out last year was between three and four in the morning on a weekday,” SocialFlow co-founder Frank Speiser told VentureBeat in an interview. “It was an article questioning the value of a Ph.D. No human would ever have predicated that was the best approach and the most significant article for their audience. Only an algorithm can key into an opportunity like that.”

The company’s customers include a slew of heavy hitters such as Pepsi, National Geographic, Dole, and The Washington Post.

But SocialFlow plays in a crowded arena: Its competitors include companies like Wildfire (recently acquired by Google) and ExactTarget (recently gone public).

To date, the startup has taken between $17 million and $20 million in angel and venture capital funding. SocialFlow was founded in 2009 and is based in New York City with a satellite office in San Francisco.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Self-described digital anthropologist Brian Solis has a habit of being in the right place at the right time.

During the late 1990s, Solis attended all the right events, voraciously blogged, and snapped thousands of photos of Silicon Valley’s newly-minted technology elite. He quickly became one of the original “super connectors,” acting as a bridge between tech and digital media influencers around the world.

But it’s far more than good fortune and a strong network — Solis is a futurist of sorts, and has a knack for recognizing trends. He was among the earliest proponents of the social media craze, and founded creative agencies to help businesses utilize Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest.

All this spiralled into an events career (a keynote speaker at SWSX, Solis recently interviewed Shaquille O’Neale, who has become a firm friend), a high-powered analyst gig at Altimeter Group, and a series of bestselling novels on the business of social media.

I caught up with Solis in the weeks after the release of his new book, “What’s the Future of Business, Changing the way businesses create experiences.” As he explains, the book offers honest insights into how businesses can reach “Generation C” (the C stands for connected), and the most common mistakes to avoid.

VentureBeat: So what’s the new book about?

Brian Solis: This isn’t a traditional business book. The subtitle is, “Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences” and to change experiences takes something special. See, at the heart of new technology is people, the connections they make and the experiences they share in public. These shared experiences represent the future of branding, shifting marketing from a position of impressions to focus on expressions. While it might sound a bit abstract, it is these shared experiences that are starting to match and even surpass traditional branding and media.

“Generation-C” doesn’t necessarily take to Google first to research or make decisions wherever they are in the customer lifecycle. They rely on the shared experiences in the form of Q&A, reviews, and shared content to inform or validate decisions.

VentureBeat: So how can businesses reach this “Gen-C”?

Solis: Websites aren’t the most efficient or effective means of deliver to Gen-C, especially when most of them use smart phones or tablets while they’re on the go. They want information quickly and they want it personalized. Call it the lazy web if you will, but if companies are investing in SEO and SEM to feed information to people who are captive in search mode, then they will also have to invest in the experiences they want people to have and share so that in the real world. And right now, those shared experiences are largely reactive and undefined by businesses.

VentureBeat:  Almost as interesting as the book itself is your efforts to promote it. Tweets from Donald Trump and Oprah! WTF?

Shaq is an avid supporter of the new book.

Solis: While I have had the opportunity to work with many celebrities in the past, the post in which you’re referencing was more of an event to call attention to a controversial online app, LetMeTweetThatforYou. I used the service to demonstrate the potential liability of faking Tweets and how we each need to re-think fact checking before we retweet or share.

VentureBeat: Would you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your next book?

Can you believe that this is my fifth book and my third with Wiley? In 2012, business author Seth Godin took to Kickstarter to raise money for The Icarus Deception. I believe he was seeking somewhere in the neighborhood $40,000 and ended up pulling in $287,000. While Kickstarter is an interesting option, it does introduce production, distribution and marketing responsibilities that require careful consideration.

The Wiley team allowed me to assume creative control where I acted as author and art director. I brought in the team from Mekanism (the creative agency behind the Pepsi and Beyonce commercial at this year’s Super Bowl) and none other that @gapingvoid and his team at Social Object Factory to help me turn a book into an analog app.

VentureBeat: How did you first make a name for yourself in the Valley? You were a blogger / photographer/ chronicler of sorts? 

Solis: It goes back to the mid-90’s when I was an experimental marketer in the world of new media. I grew up as an aspiring programmer in Los Angeles. But like many, I recognized the importance Silicon Valley and moved to Northern California in 1996 to pursue my passion of learning how technology was impacting culture. I was infatuated with message boards and forums and connected societies that could make and move markets.

I tested theories with large brands and startups with fascinating results. I decided to launch a lab in 1999 called FutureWorks that helped prove and test new ideas for technology and consumer electronics clients and over the 12 years I ran that company, we helped thousands find success online in addition to or completely outside of traditional media programs.

VentureBeat: How did you build the “Brian Solis” brand?

One of many images of Facebook’s CEO by Brian Solis

Some time in the mid 2000s as Web 2.0 was finding its footing, I started to practice what I was preaching. I started blogging at briansolis.com to share the experiments and lessons learned in new media. I also launched bub.blicio.us to spotlight the changing world as I saw it. I thought that pictures, video and words were equally important. I also launched a video series called TechSoup, and spent time mastering the art of photography. A little known fact is that many of my pictures of notable entrepreneurs, investors and celebrities are often used in media of all sorts. To this day, more than 3 million people have viewed these pictures on Flickr.

All of this contributed to who I am today. The blogging led to books. The pictures led to exposure in some of the world’s largest media outlets. The videos became the entryway to launch Revolution a popular online series that I host, which has featured incredible guests such Katie Couric, Billy Corgan, Shaq, Adrian Grenier, among others.

VentureBeat: What are the biggest social media faux-pas you see businesses make when they try to market to “Gen C”? 

Solis: As an analyst, this question seems to be the focus of my work over the last several years.  This comes back to the inspiration behind my last book. The problem is that most of us are merely reacting to technology and not harnessing it to take us where we want to go. We understand its importance but we don’t truly understand why it’s important to our business.

While everyone thinks they already know that technology is changing behavior, the reality is that assumptions and blind faith are still playing a role in how businesses are approaching these changes. Many experts believe that mobile and social networks are the new channels for engagement. They place their bets on the number of people each network boasts, as well as by the amount of attention press and bloggers pay to what’s hot.

However, experts cannot tell you the role certain networks play in the customer’s decision- making cycle. Nor can they pinpoint the economic impact of activity or conversations on the business before, during, and after the transaction. That is why the answer to the question of what the return on investment (ROI) of these initiatives is elusive. Instead they come up with new jargon to support their blind faith.

VentureBeat: So technology isn’t the be all, end all? 

Solis: Technology is not the answer, it’s part of the answer. This is one of the reasons that I am an aspiring digital anthropologist. Without an understanding of behavior and the role technology plays in our personal and professional lives we will consistently find ourselves responding to it instead of putting it to work for us.

And in a connected society, one where people believe their experiences are paramount, what people share and say about you becomes as or more pervasive than what you say about you.

Top image credit: affiliatesummit via photopin cc // Brian Solis from Altimeter credit: alexdecarvalho via photopin cc

Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

photo credit: gordonr via photopin cc

That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

The new site includes a short Twitter 101 overview for those to whom “tweet” and “hashtag” are still Greek. And an overview of what Twitter’s 200 million active users actually do while posting 400 million tweets a day. There’s also an overview on how to write good tweets: They should be conversational, funny, shareable, and exceptional.

There’s been a definite acceleration in Twitter monetization efforts. The company released new self-service ad tools just two weeks ago that allow small business advertisers to finely target their campaigns by geography, gender, device, and interests. And Twitter’s new Ads API for larger clients and agencies has been live for just over a month.

One interesting thing about Twitter’s new business user intro video is how the social network now sees itself as a “global dialogue where people talk about their deepest interests … including your business.”

Whether your company is one of people’s deepest interests may be of some debate. But the new Pope was announced via Twitter, so why not your business?

Here’s Twitter’s new intro video for business:

Image credit: Twitter

Facebook’s presentation — and images — were curiously void of detail on how ads will fit into the new Facebook, but you can bet it’s been a hugely significant part of the conversation as Facebook continues to seek lucrative but appropriate ways of monetizing the social network.

A Facebook representative did tell me via email that businesses now have an “even more visually rich way to showcase content” and that users respond better to more visual stories. In addition, she said, your cover photo is going to be even more important in the new reality, as it will show up in the news feed in all its glory — or lack thereof — when a friend likes a business:

One superimportant point: The new news feed is NOT being accompanied by a new algorithm.

In other words, Facebook is not using this roll-out as an opportunity to revamp EdgeRank, the programmatic method by which Facebook determines how interesting you are, how interesting your content is, and therefore and most critically, how often and where to display your messages.

The early reports from advertisers are agreement with Facebook’s messaging.

“Facebook’s news is unbelievably exciting,” Fiksu CEO Micah Adler says. “Introducing enhanced feeds creates rich contextual advertising opportunities and serves as a perfect complement to Facebook’s unprecedented targeting and measurement capabilities.”

Nothing matters more to advertisers than context, Adler says, saying that while Facebook likes are simple, one-dimensional indications of positive sentiment, interactions between advertisers and people through contextual targeting in the new news feeds will “inevitably increase buyer interest.” He added that Fikus is planning to invest “significantly in new ad units on Facebook, particularly in mobile.

“The new look for Facebook’s News Feed promises new opportunities for advertisers,” Adobe media and ads director Justin Merickel said. “As users tend to show a stronger interest in active, personalized news feeds, embedded ads will likely be more relevant and generate higher ROI for advertisers.”

One concern? The feed choice options that Facebook is implementing.

“The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume which may be a concern — but it does stop people getting upset with sponsored content appearing around their friends content,” Simon Mansell, the CEO of TBGdigital, said. “Standout will be harder for brands as a result but it’s probably a better user experience.”

Source: Facebook

Facebook’s new news feed options

That said, he added that “the chronological view is interesting — as it removes the argument that there is an algorithm in between users and content.”

Sarah Carter, the GM of social business at Actiance, echoed the concern, but she noted that overall, brands that truly get social marketing could do better with the new feed:

“People can skip content from a business if they want to,” Carter said. “The flip side is that the new design is meant to get people browsing for longer, and improve the overall Facebook experience. So if a business is able to effectively market to its audience on this channel, using content that is visual, relevant and spoken in an authentic voice, the ROI should be greater.”

One other tip from Facebook echoed Mansell’s comments: People will be able to choose the “Following” feed, which will simply display everything that every user and company they are following is publishing. That “reality-bubble free” zone in Facebook could get very interesting as people discover an unfiltered lens into their full social graph.

The new feed roll-out will happen “very slowly” over the coming weeks on mobile and web, Facebook says.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii.

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

The move is widely being touted as a very wise one by Twitter — and for the right reasons. It enables Twitter to tap into the expertise of third party application developers with a proven track record of developing marketing platforms that help advertisers in launching, managing and optimizing their campaigns at scale.

Regardless of how big your advertising budgets are, Twitter’s Ads API and the value that it promises to deliver via third party ad solutions providers is unquestionable.

But how exactly will this impact marketers and marketing budgets? What tangible outcomes can advertisers expect from these third party ad solutions providers in the not so distant future?

Buying Twitter ad units just got easier

Balachandar Ganesh

Up until yesterday, the only way you could buy advertising real estate on Twitter was either off their basic self-service interface or from their direct sales team. Not only is this far from optimal, it is also extremely difficult to scale if you want to run frequent and multiple campaigns. There’s always been a demand for gaining more eyeballs on Twitter through advertising (Twitter sees nearly half a billion tweets on the platform every day!) and with this announcement, Twitter just widened the supply pipes.

The Ads API is a definitive step towards building a developer ecosystem similar to that of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. As marketers, it gives you the flexibility to buy and manage Twitter ad units from a variety of developers, and arguably, do so easily and effectively.

Creating ad campaigns on Twitter just got easier

Creating and managing ad campaigns on Twitter was a labour intensive process — a process that couldn’t scale to meet the requirements of agencies and big brands. Consider an agency creating thousands of new ad units for their clients every day. These ads had to be manually uploaded, one by one. Editing these ad units, if you had to, was equally painful.

Running scheduled ad campaigns? Forget about it!

By tapping into the goodness of third-party tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, GraphEffect from SHIFT and TBG Digital’s One Media Manager (and likely many more in the very near future), advertisers can now upload and edit bulk ads, and effortlessly create, plan and run ad campaigns like they do for Facebook or YouTube.

Reporting and analytics just got better

Twitter’s native ad analytics and reporting tools are, well, threadbare. Here’s a look at the entire repertoire of Twitter’s analytics for promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Twitter doesn’t offer much apart from pretty basic metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. Hardly enough to wet the lips of advertisers spending $200,000 per day on a promoted trend (yes, they’ve upped the price from the $80,000 they used to charge when it first launched).

Adding context to these metrics and enriching them with perspective that you glean from cross-channel ad campaigns is something that Facebook, LinkedIn and now, Twitter’s partner ecosystem is more than capable of delivering on.

You can squeeze more bang-for-your-buck with hyper targeting

Twitter barely offers anything in terms of targeting.

Since launching their promoted products suite, Twitter has offered businesses the ability to target by geography, by gender and only recently, by interest. There already is an impressive ecosystem of vendors that do some pretty neat stuff around generating in-depth audience profiles, like being able to suggest and rank individuals according to topic specific influence levels, or giving you a list of users similar to your target audience. As Twitter expands their Ads API partner ecosystem, marketing software vendors with a strong focus on analytics will be able to give marketers the ability to run highly targeted and highly contextual ad campaigns.

Want to run a promoted tweet campaign to get the attention of influential folks in technology, living in Palo Alto, and are unsatisfied Verizon customers? No problem!

You can finally expect data-driven real-time ad campaign optimization

The industry for tapping into the social web, mining for relevant conversations, and optimizing engagement is awash with hundreds of vendors catering to a wide array of requirements. In the process of adopting an ‘always-on’ approach in monitoring for trends or impending crises that could snowball into something disastrous, they generate a lot of real-time or near real-time insights. These insights can now be used to complete the feedback loop in optimizing ad campaigns at run time.

And maybe, just maybe …

Right now, the only engagement metrics on Twitter that are indicative of the success or failure of an ad campaign are retweets, @mentions and replies. You really can’t measure much else with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. However, Twitter is looking into newer ad units, giving advertisers more options to engage with their target audience.

The ad unit that Twitter is currently testing features an image with a ‘Get it Now’ button (see image below), giving marketers the ability to generate leads directly from Tweets. You can also expect Vine lending itself as a new, meaningful ad unit. 6 second videos on autoplay could very well be Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook’s rumoured autoplay video ads.

Whether or not Twitter chooses to roll out lead cards, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that Twitter will be rolling out newer, more complex ad units in the near future, enabling their partner ecosystem to deliver algorithmic, analytics- intensive, data-driven technology solutions so advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.

Folks, Twitter marketing just got serious.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii, an interactive web-based platform for business software selection. In his previous role as an enterprise software analyst at Ovum, Bala evaluated over a hundred enterprise technologies in depth and authored reports that helped businesses mitigate technology adoption related challenges. He also undertook a number of consulting engagements, advising companies ranging from garage startups to global multi-billion dollar firms. Bala is a graduate in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, where he focused on Internet Governance and Policy related issues.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Tweet bird

Business, obviously, loves Facebook.

The number of total pages has jumped more than two million in the past three months to hit a new milestone: over 15 million, Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business said at an advertising conference in New York. In addition, a Facebook representative told me that the number of accounts using Facebook’s mobile management app for brands, Page Manager, is up to more than eight million.

It’s no shock that brands love Facebook because advertisers go where the people are. But the more than two million jump in page count since December is a pretty sharp uptick and a sign of increasing momentum.

Pages got their big overhaul almost exactly a year ago when Facebook gave brands big, beautiful cover photos and all the other Timeline goodies as well as vastly better admin controls. The Pages app itself launched just a month or two after that redesign.

Pages are a big part of Facebook monetization plans, of course, as Facebook continues to build its native advertising options such as promoted posts.

photo credit: channelship via photopin cc

And … do you give back to the social community that you’re hoping to profit from?

These are the types of questions Sprout Social’s new #BePresent project is focused on answering — and answering for free. Starting today, brands can go to Sprout Social’s MustBePresent website and get a free checkup on how well they respond to fans and followers.

Source: Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s new engagement report shows how you rank compared to your competition.

“This is a way for brands to measure themselves against their competition,” Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard told me yesterday. ”There has been a lot of conversation about brands needing to be responsive, but there hasn’t been an efficient way … to be measured against each other.”

The report engine charts 45 billion social signals, Sprout Social says, to arrive at not only a score for your company, brand, or organization but also a comparison of your score with your industry’s average score.

Which also means, of course, that your data will be used as part of other companies’ benchmarks. But Sprout Social anonymizes the data, Howard told me, to ensure that your brand’s privacy is maintained.

The result is the kind of report that you might see created specifically by analysts or social research firms, but it is now available anytime, specifically for your company and industry, for free.

The Twitter part, that is.

“Any brand can go to mustbepresent.com, plug in a Twitter handle, and get a comprehensive report,” Howard said.

Of course, Sprout Social also does Facebook analytics and more, but those features and functionality, including analyzing multiple profiles — a dedicated support account, for instance — are reserved for Sprout Social clients.

Howard is careful to say that this is not a panacea report that will diagnose all of a company’s social media problems. And it’s a not a leaderboard or a badge to put on your site. It’s simply a way to check, objectively, how well you’re engaging your audience in social: something that you and your team can use to improve.

And it will help you to be a good social citizen, says Howard:

“Brands need to be aware that as valuable as social is as a marketing channel, it’s important to be responsive and return some of the value back to the ecosystem.”

photo credit: JefferyTurner via photopin cc

Far too cheap.

Beauty products retailer and digital trailblazer Sephora says that per-capita, its Pinterest followers spend more money than its Facebook followers, and not just a little bit more. In fact, Pinterest users spend 15 times more on Sephora products than Facebook followers, Sephora’s head of digital Julie Bornstein told me this morning.

“The reality is that when you’re in the Pinterest mindset, you’re actually interested in acquiring items, which is not what people go to Facebook for,” Bornstein said. “Facebook continues to be just a great customer interaction tool that gives us the real-time ability to dialog with our customer; it’s a big customer-service venue for us.”

Ouch.

If you’re Facebook, that’s gotta hurt. You’ve just been downgraded from the bright and shining future of social shopping to the back office hell of customer support.

Sephora jumped on Pinterest hard, mostly because its largely-female marketing team were enthusiastic early adopters. When the company re-launched its website in April last year, it was one of the first retailers to integrate the ‘Pin It’ button sitewide. Individual users share their lists of what Sephora products they love and why — rather than just a putting together a list of fashion products, they can use Pinterest to tell a visual story about why a certain eyeshadow is so great and seek to inspire others. And a dedicated resource on the Sephora digital team helps Sephora staff craft Pinterest strategies.

All of which has made an impact.

Sephora’s following on Facebook is still huge and significant, at 4.7 million fans. And it’s a critical early-warning system for the company. “We hear instantly” about what people love and don’t love, Bornstein says, and Sephora clients connect with each other on the platform, giving each other fashion and beauty tips and advice.

But in terms of immediately measurable commercial impact? Pinterest is currently unmatched.

“E-commerce really is still in the first innings of really leveraging the power of social,” Bornstein says. “But we’ve experimented a lot with social shopping, and this is the first one that has really gotten to scale.”

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc, swanky via photopin cc

Those are some of the questions social media marketing firm Offerpop hopes to answer for you with two new interesting tools released this morning into public beta.

The New York-based company, which already works with brands like Pepsi, Gap, and MTV, wants to help you better understand your audience — not just your fans, and turn your ongoing data collection into a simple, actionable asset. And the new tools are already boosting engagement by 84 percent for brands like Viacom’s Logo TV and increasing fan loyalty by 195 percent.

What’s really new?

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a product offering get a sense of your full social engagement,” Offerpop’s director of content marketing Jesse Noyes told me this morning. “Not just the people who have liked you, but all the people who have engaged with you in any way.”

The two new tools are a Facebook post database, which shows what kinds of content is driving engagement, virality, and clicks, and a fan database, which helps you build rich profiles of your Facebook fans and enriches them over time. Twitter, which Offerpop also offers campaigns on, is coming soon.

The tools not only tell you that the post last week about Brad Pitt’s graying hair resonated well, but also that all your posts that reference aging movie stars generally go viral. And with about three clicks, you can generate a list of your fans — and non-fans — who are responsive to similar messages.

“This also works for people who aren’t fans of your page,” Offerpop CEO Wendell Lansford said. “That’s a completely unique offering … no one to my knowledge is doing this.”

The new fan database tool automatically calculates scores for three key metrics based on people’s behavior: loyalty, engagement, and influence. In the future, Lansford hopes to have tools that enable you to post to Facebook specifically targeting groups based on those profiles, but currently marketers can do three fairly powerful things with data: They can email sets of users based on what they’re most likely to respond to, target specific people with specific ads, or find look-alikes of the people who are their most loyal and engaged fans.

“Right away, we started making valuable discoveries about what our fans find interesting,” Shawn Hollenbach, a digital marketing manager at Logo TV said in a statement. “We were able to use these insights to inform our promotional strategy and drive value beyond social marketing.”

The new products are available immediately in public beta on Offerpop’s site, and anyone using the company’s campaign tools has access to them at no extra charge, the company told me.

photo credit: mindfreeze86 via photopin cc

You chose one of three or four channels, spent your money, and hoped for the best. The awesome and awful new digital reality, however, is that the number of channels is now infinite, and customers interact with you in multiple separate ways. Good luck tracking your spend, understanding who you’re contacting, and determining your overall return on investment.

That’s a problem that companies like CrowdTwist are starting to address.

“In the last 10 to 15 years the ecosystem has exploded,” CrowdTwist CEO Irving Fain told me last week. “There are new channels popping up every week, and consumers are spending time with brands in new places … engaging with brands like the Miami Dolphins across eight to 10 channels, which makes them look like eight to 10 people.”

So what CrowdTwist does is aggregate those channels, and the people in them, so that brands know that Bob, Bo, and BJ are all one person, creating value for your brand by tweeting about you, sharing you, and pinning you. It starts with a loyalty program, which CrowdTwist provides as white-lable software-as-a-service for organizations like the Dolphins and the X Factor.

People join the program and connect their social media identities, helping the brand see them as one individual. Why? They get points, which lead to discounts and special retail offers. But they also get exclusive access to opportunities that others can only dream of.

“We had fans that helped bring the American flag out into the Dolphins’ stadium before a game and meet them team,” Fain said. “One flew all the way in from California. These are rewards you just can’t buy.”

Knowing who your customers are is important, but knowing what they’re doing is even more important.

Loyalty program on steroids?

“Loyalty programs were created to measure consumer impact,” Fain says. “But the only point they could identify me was when I spent money. So there was a 1:1 correlation between dollars spent and customer value.”

That doesn’t reflect a customers’ true value when you take into account word-of-mouth, social sharing, and the impact that one customers can have on two, five, or a hundred others. So CrowdTwist has created what Fain calls an “Impact Score,” which measures individual consumers’ impact on a brand, beyond their spend.

“In one program, the average spend was$45,” Fain told me. “One woman spent $43, so in a traditional program you would have just ignored her — she was completely average. But it turned out she had impacted over a thousand dollars all on her own.”

Once you find super-sharers like that woman, Fain says, you can start to create “look-alike” models by finding common trends around those consumers, creating profiles of what they look like, how they act, where they are, who they are. And then you can focus your marketing dollars, retention efforts, and campaigns on those who are most likely to “infect” others.

“In one example, a consumer that checks in on Foursquare at Zumiez spends five times more than others,” Fain said.

Second screen

Understanding your customers and where they are also helps you understand where to meet them.

“The second screen becomes another touch point in which consumers and fans are engaging with the brand on a day-to-day basis,” Fain said. “We want to measure that.”

For X Factor, mobile app usage grew from under 40 percent in week one to over 60 percent by week two. Fans “syncing” their apps to the show increase almost 20 times during the first hour of the live show, as fans unlocked bonus features and content.  ”The X Factor did a really strong job of integrating mobile into the show, and then we were able to provide Fox with the data to let them know what worked and what didn’t work,” Fain says.

The Miami Dolphins provided an interesting insight into fan behavior. CrowdTwist saw an “enormous” uptick in site traffic before the games, but during the game, most of the traffic — and the chatter — moved to the social networks: Twitter and Facebook. Traffic dropped, but social mentions were up. Then, after the game, fans returned to the website for analysis, video highlights and interviews, and more.

“Watching sports is a fundamentally social endeavor,” Fain explains. “Prior to the game it’s about personal information, content, consumption … then when the game actually starts to happen it becomes a social endeavor — relating with other people. Then after the game, people return.”

The goal is personalization

All this aggregation of social data, web data, app data, and personal information sounds like classic big data: vast, impersonal, and perhaps even clinical. But the focus and the plan is actually quite different.

“It’s really about aggregating the information across all these systems and bringing it back to individual people … about actually improving personalization,” Fain says.

If you know that a customer who checks in spends more, you can spend some time saying hello and getting to know him or her. (How many store and restaurant managers actually know who is the Foursquare mayor of their location?)

And if you know that Bob and BJ are the same person, you can send him one message, not two, and be much more aware about what he already knows about you, and does for you. Which means you can, essentially, be more real and personal.

At least in theory. Once you’ve got this data, the really hard work is using it well.

photo credit: Haags Uitburo via photopin cc, San Diego Shooter via photopin cc, Ernst Vikne via photopin cc

“The core reason for the deal is that we have a killer Facebook advertising solution, and they have a killer Facebook analytics solution,” Unified VP of corporate communications Dave Donohue told me this morning.

Unified, which will have Mayor Ed Lee cut the ribbon on its San Francisco office tomorrow, wants to provide a holistic solution for marketers that bring together “paid, owned, and earned media,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen said in a statement. It currently offers solutions for building social audiences, encounrage customer actions, and measuring the value of social marketing. Unified launched just a year ago in January and boostrapped to 35 employees, Donohue said, before bringing in outside investment.

The goal in adding PageLever’s analytics and management tools is to deliver the industry’s “deepest and broadest” real-time audience insights, audience engagement, and social advertising. PageLever offers a solution for maximizing fan engagement inside the Facebook news feed by targeting posts, identifying what is most viral or engaging, and managing multiple pages.

Owen said that the result would be the “most complete social advertising platform to access all major social networks.”

PageLever’s seven employees will be joining Unified’s 50 in both their new San Francisco and existing New York offices, the company said, and all existing PageLever clients will continue to be able to use PageLever’s solutions as standalone products, although an integrated product roadmap will become available shortly.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

photo credit: IBM Events via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

The social media marketing platform that competes with the likes of Wildfire, Sprinklr, and Involver grew 440 percent last year, went global, and added companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and L’Oreal — you may have heard of them once or twice – to its now 8,000-strong client list.

How? Through the back door.

“We’ve basically built our company around the notion of a self-service platform,” chief executive Wendell Landsford told me from New York today. “People try for free, and if they see value, they keep using the product.”

That started with perhaps humble beginnings with small companies as social marketers created Facebook photo contests and Twitter retweet offers. But it led to massive opportunities at some of the largest corporations in the world.

“As we got success on the self-service product, we started to be adopted bottom-up in enterprise organizations,” Wendell said. “In companies like Unilever, Viacom, or Pepsi, some marketer might try OfferPop. Then we’d reach out, establish a relationship, and get more exposure in these companies, which broadened our footprint.”

Initial success led to Offerpop codifying these opportunities into a sales process, and the company now has a specific division of its sales force dedicated to key enterprise accounts. It’s the new enterprise sales model, Wendell says, with Salesforce.com as its “poster child.”

The model works for upstart young startups. But it also has significant benefits for enterprise companies. As Wendell says, one massive bonus to this model is that a product “has to prove its worth … companies don’t end up with shelfware.”

Offerpop, which closed a $5.7 million series B founding round in December, is now expanding internationally, opening an office in the U.K. and one other to-be-determined location. That’s a direct result of having internationalized the product, translating it to 17 different languages in early 2012. (Which, by the way, is also helpful for major brands, who typically do business internationally.)

Perhaps the most interesting news, however, is the new product suite that Offerpop will be announcing in February. While the company wouldn’t release full details yet, Wendell did give me a sneak peek: “big data.”

“As companies use Offerpop and expand to 350 campaigns or more, there’s a ton of data that gets built up and captured,” he said. “Historically, that’s been kept in individual campaign reports, but it doesn’t provide cohesive, actionable insight.”

So Offerpop is pulling out all the data from all of a company’s campaigns, enriching it with everything that it knows about the company’s fans and customers — including the content they tend to respond to — and making is useable for better marketing on social media, as well as multichannel marketing via email, online marketing, and more.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this product sounds perfect for enterprise as well.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

Currently, 90 percent of small businesses are on Facebook, but only a third of these actually post to the site more than a couple times a week, and another third want to spend even less time on social media. That may need to change with Facebook’s new graph search.

At least, if you want your local business to grow.

The Complete Small Business Marketing Guide used to have about one page: Advertise in Yellow Pages. For the past couple of years, though, it has included Facebook, blogging, Google-friendliness, Twitter, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, not mention mobile ads and SMS marketing campaigns.

But with graph search, all of this could change. Or become much less effective.

Facebook’s new graph search is going to allow Facebook’s billion-plus members to easily and quickly find the best local businesses – according to their friends, and other locals. Restaurants, dentists, doctors, or carpenters: Facebook will highlight the services and businesses that your friends like, use, comment on, and respond to. Facebook has a billion-plus members who have uploaded 240 billion photos and created over a trillion connections between themselves — and with businesses.

“It’s nice to see … any tool that makes it easier for the local business to be found is good for local businesses,” says Mike Lyman, a local marketing expert. “It’s another reason for a local business to have a Facebook page — some have been shying away because of the ROI, the investment in time.”

Graph search is a big deal — and a big shift for local search.

Local businesses have already jumped on the social bandwagon, but now it’s not just about presence. And it’s not just about doing it because everyone else is doing it. Now, it’s about maximizing social visibility — social media optimization — just as smart businesses have worked for years on search engine optimization.

No likes? It’ll be hard to appear in social search. And while fake likes from users in Kazakstan might make you look good on the outside, they won’t translate to business because they won’t be truly local. Lots of likes but no interactions? Again, it’ll be hard to gain visibility when local people search for the best businesses. Facebook will be looking at a wide variety of social signals when determining what to show users in response to their queries.

What’ll work?

“Being active, having good content, and participating regularly are all key,” Lyman says. “It’s now beyond the like … you need to engage your customers somehow and get them to participate. Increasing your engagement will increase your visibility, so interactivity is the key.”

In other words, local businesses that have been dedicated to growing a loyal, responsive fanbase by both doing great work and being active in engaging local people via Facebook are best positioned to win at the new social media optimization.

photo credit: Porter Novelli Global via photopin cc

Because on December 21 last year, Facebook quietly added the ability to segment fans by region in the API it provides to analytics firms. Which means that social media monitoring companies like Socialbakers are finding all kinds of juicy oddities in the fan counts of major brands.

“We looked at airliners,” Socialbakers chief exec Jan Rezab told me. “For example, Lufhansa does not fly to Indonesia or Bali or Jakarta … but they have a lot of fans from there. And Pakistan is their number four fan country, and they also don’t fly to Pakistan.”

Twelve percent of Lufthansa fans are from Indonesia, Rezab said, and another eight percent are from Pakistan, meaning that a full fifth of the brand’s fans are from places the airline doesn’t serve, and never has.

Which isn’t exactly proof of fraudulent behavior or buying of fans. But it is a little suspicious.

In August 2012, Facebook estimated there were 83 million fake accounts. And the world’s biggest social network has already made attempts to cut back on fake likes and fake users, which resulted in some brands and celebrities losing over 100,000 likes in a single day in November, 2012. Unfortunately, the scammers have gotten smarter too.

Of course, not all regional fan discrepancies are automatically cause for alert.

Over half of global consulting giant Accenture’s 157,000 Facebook fans are from India, but the massive outsourcing multinational also employs 80,000 people in the country. And only 47 percent of Obama’s Facebook fans are U.S.-based — which helped him beat out Mitt Romney in the social media presidential race — but he’s a global political figure and has global fans.

Massive regional oddities can raise eyebrows, however.

Regional fan counts also reveal marketing realities and opportunities. For example, Rezab mentioned that in the overall gaming console fight for fans, PlayStation 3 beats Xbox. But not everywhere.

“PlayStation wins globally,” Rezab said. “But Xbox wins in U.S., Canada, UK, Australia … essentially all the English-speaking countries, while PlayStation win in South America, Russia, France, Spain, and Germany.”

Social analytics firms have only just gained access to regional Facebook data, and not all of the three million Facebook pages that Socialbakers tracks have been updated with the new information yet. But Thursday the company will be unveiling a new social power ranking of brands with the most U.S.-based Facebook likes.

“This is the first time where you can actually see the US ranking,” says Rezab. “Before, it was cluttered with fans outside the U.S.”

photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

If your answer is never, you’re probably 75 or older and think “yelp” is a sound a dog makes.  But for the rest of us, we know that reviews are critical in influencing purchase decisions.  So critical that someone even started a business writing favorable book reviews called GettingBookReviews.com (charging, of course, $99 a pop).

If you’ve ever thought about paying for inauthentic endorsements like this, you better pump the breaks because third party review sites are now making it as obvious as Snooki’s spray tan that you’ve invested in fake reviews.

Yelp recently created consumer alerts for business pages that remain for 90 days when they sniff out phony reviews. The alert reads the following: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business. We weren’t fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the rules.”

Similarly, TripAdvisor says they have “zero tolerance for fake reviews.” If they believe that a hotel review is contrived, they will remove the review, ensure that the property is penalized in the site’s rankings, and possibly even post a message alerting millions of travelers on what they’ve found.

Considering the clout online reviews hold in consumer purchase behavior, it’s no surprise that some business owners feel compelled to invest in sham reviews:

• A one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue (source: Michael Luca, Harvard Business School).
• 70% of global consumers trust online reviews, an increase of 15 percent in four years (source: Nielsen).
• 80% of consumers change their mind after reading a single bad review (source: Cone Communications).
• One negative review can cost you 30 customers (source: Convergys).
• 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche)

But here’s the bottom line:

A few “positive” reviews won’t stop customers from continuing to complain about your crappy service or overcooked food. Instead of taking the easy (and sleazy) way out, listen to the concerns your customers are voicing and improve your business. Social media and third party review sites have put the power in the hands of the consumer. Forever. If companies don’t become customer-focused, customer-centric, customer-obsessed, they risk tarnishing their brand reputation and ultimately, losing their company.

 How to improve online ratings the honest way

The problem that many business owners face is that reviews on third party review sites might not legitimately reflect the satisfaction of their customers. Many know they have happy diners or guests; but as the saying goes, “Haters gonna hate.” Pissed off customers are sometimes more inclined to write a damaging review while the satisfied customers will recommend the restaurant or hotel at a cocktail party instead of putting their praise online.

Here’s the solution:

Find those customers who are enthusiastic about your brand, product, or service (AKA your authentic Brand Advocates), and make it drop dead easy for them to write raving reviews.

1. Ask your customers via email, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, website, or elsewhere: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends?” Those who answer 9 or 10 are your Advocates.
2. Give Advocates the tools to rate and review your product or property, or direct them directly to the relevant third party review site where they can give you a 5-star review.
3. By identifying your Advocates, you’re creating a virtual marketing force that you can leverage for much more than just reviews. They’ll gladly share offers or other announcements like a new location opening, a new chef, or a remodel of your hotel with their social networks. They’ll create personal stories about how they rekindled their love at your resort or made a new friend with one of the gregarious employees who waited on them.

Whatever you do, don’t pay for reviews or recommendations of any sort. There is no longer room for businesses that don’t understand the importance of authenticity and transparency in the era of social media.

Instead, tap into the enthusiasm of your highly satisfied customers and empower them to fight negative word of mouth for you.

By Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance (@carafuggetta)

photo credit: Dave77459 via photopin cc

In last month’s Christmas shopping season, paper catalogs influenced more holiday shopping than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and mobile advertising platforms. And that’s not just for bricks-and-mortar stores — that’s for online shopping too.

Flyers and catalogs influenced 22 percent of online purchases and just slightly less, 21 percent, of offline purchases, according to the 1000-participant study by Baynote, a customer experience solutions company. Facebook, meanwhile, influenced 15 percent of online purchases and 12 percent of offline, and Twitter and Pinterest were at the 10 percent levels for both, according to Baynote.

“This year’s survey demonstrates the difficulty of selecting one marketing channel over another as the connected consumer becomes the status quo and as mobile and social shopping behaviors mature,” Dan Darnell, Baynote’s VP of marketing said in a statement. (It’s worth noting that Baynote’s business is multi-channel marketing solutions for retailers.)

There is some hope for digital marketers, however, even if social media is not yet turning out to be the powerhouse for revenue that some have wanted it to be.

Good old-fashioned email promotions edged out flyers in online purchases, affecting a full quarter of all online sales, and just barely trailed in offline sales. Google searches were basically tied with email promotions, and online ratings and reviews were the most powerful of all, affecting a full third of all online purchases and a quarter of all offline.

Which brings us to Amazon’s massive power as America’s price checker.

A full two-thirds of consumers don’t go to a price comparison engine, or to Google, or to local stores to check prices. Instead, they go straight to Amazon for price comparisons. (Personal note: This rings true. If I find a price somewhere online or off, checking Amazon is a good way to check if the pricing is good, great, or way out of the ballpark.)

Which is interesting, in a sense, given the fact that retailers have shown a great deal of concern about showrooming: being used as a physical location for consumers to check out products. As much as that’s a concern, and it actually happens, Amazon is also being used as the national price checker of record.

In fact, it’s likely more than that. The percentage of sales influenced by online ratings and reviews is massive, as mentioned above. And the best place to do that for any random product that you’re considering purchasing? Amazon, which probably has more ratings and reviews than any other single site. There’s a reason Google is working on its shopping solutions.

More details, including on smartphone and tablet use in online and offline sales, in Baynote’s infographic:

photo credit: Oliver Ortega Chua via photopin cc

Breaking some news about itself, the AP announced today that it will be selling access to its popular — 1.5 million followers — Twitter feed. Samsung will be buying two tweets a day during the next week, synced up with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“As an industry, we must be looking for new ways to develop revenues while providing good experiences for advertisers and consumers,” AP managing editor Lou Ferrara said in a statement. “At the same time, advertisers and audiences expect AP to do that without compromising its core mission of breaking news.”

Appropriately enough, the AP broke the news about its new Twitter ad revenue on Twitter itself:

.@AP provides sponsored tweets during electronics show: bit.ly/Zxfugq #2013ces

—
AP CorpComm (@AP_CorpComm) January 07, 2013

Twitter offers Promoted tweets, which brands who publish on Twitter can purchase to increase their reach and follower count. Promoted Tweets don’t work like Facebook’s Promoted Posts, which are only shown to people who have already liked you, or, optionally, also to people who are friends of those who like your brand. Promoted tweets appear to everyone that their buyers target.

But Twitter offers no native capability for brands or people on Twitter to sell access to their tweet stream themselves — possibly missing out on a revenue opportunity. But a somewhat shady underworld of tweet-selling sites like Pay4Tweet, TwitPub, and Buy Sponsored Tweets has been around for some time.

Ad.ly has even made a business out of selling tweets to brands from celebrity accounts. Tweets from accounts like Kim Kardashian’s or Snoop Dogg’s run from $1,000 to $10,000 each.

The AP’s sponsored tweets don’t appear to run afoul of Twitter rules, which has banned selling tweets that are place programmatically. As long as paid tweets are posted manually and disclose the fact that they are sponsored, Twitter seems to be fine with the practice.

The question is, however, for how long?

Twitter needs revenue to justify its value, even with its massive user growth. This is a source of revenue which has spawned an almost black-market ecosystem in trading tweets for cash. Few Twitter users would complain about a rules change that forced sold tweets to be purchased via a Twitter-owned service, as few users would be impacted by the change. And by skimming 30 percent, perhaps, off the top, Twitter would invent a new revenue strategy.

In the meantime, the AP will be collecting some cash from Samsung for accessing an audience it has built on Twitter. And Twitter will get precisely zilch.

photo credit: screenpunk via photopin cc

But whatever the cause, Barack Obama is the the king of social media, according to a new poll by social marketing firm SocialToaster. Three-thousand of the company’s social media pros ranked the president of the United States as the most influential social media person of 2012.

The other top finishers were mostly entertainers and media personages:

1. Barack Obama: 50 percent
2. Justin Bieber: 38.2 percent
3. Lady Gaga: 35.3 percent
4. Ashton Kutcher: 32.4 percent
5. Anderson Cooper: 26.5 percent

In the same poll, SocialToaster asked the social media marketers who was most likely to influence them on a social issue. Social posts by close friends ranked highest, with 95 percent agreeing that a friend’s post was influential, while family came in at only 56.1 percent. Well-known bloggers ran a fairly close third at 39 percent.

Oh, and if you don’t want to be unfriended or unfollowed, avoid these behaviors, which respondents ranked by likelihood of defriending:

1. Racism: 73.2 percent
2. Sexism: 63.4 percent
3. Porn: 53.7 percent
4. Repetitiousness: 51.2 percent
5. Too personal: 39 percent
6. Poor grammar: 34.1 percent

Here’s the infographic:

Social media marketing has been a bit Wild West at times — sometimes resulting in Facebook banning brands or marketing agencies. To ensure marketing campaigns on its platform follow Facebook’s rules, Facebook has long preferred that brands use approved marketing vendors, launching a Preferred Developer Consultant program this past April.

Now that program has a home online — and marketers have a directory in which to search for partners.

That home is the new Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Center, where Facebook lists 260+ preferred marketing partners who can help marketers do anything from create pages, manage ad campaigns, run Facebook contests, build Facebook-connected apps, and analyze Facebook page and interaction results.

What this means for agencies that want to provide Facebook marketing services, of course, is that they need to be on the list for maximum credibility.

Facebook’s strategic PMDs, which is a designation “reserved for a small group of PMDs that are driving outstanding positive impact in our marketing developer ecosystem” include Adobe, Glow, and SocialCode. Facebook Exchange partners, who integrate with Facebook’s real-time ad sales engine, include AdRoll, Criteo, and Xaxis.

Interestingly, the PMD center includes a sort of purgatory where partners who have access to the Facebook Ads API but have not yet qualified for the PMD badge are displayed. They include Acquisio, Havas Digital, ReachLocal, WiseMetrics, and dozens of other companies.

The PMD center should make it easier for brands looking for reputable social media marketing partners. It will also make it easier for Facebook to control what happens on its platform.

I found Facebook’s description of the Strategic PMD level partners revealing:

Each Strategic PMD earned the distinction through a rigorous selection process that, among other considerations, is based on shared values, strategic alignment, and growth potential with Facebook.

Shared values, strategic alignment, and growth potential … in other words, they won’t do things we don’t want them to do, and they will drive significant profits.

Pinterest analytics and marketing company Pinfluencer announced this morning that 50 brands, including Gilt, Martha Stewart, and Shape Magazine ran Pinterest promotions on its platform, which launched in private beta in October. The brands boosted follower acquisition rates by 156 percent and pins/day by 125 percent.

Another company, JetSetter, ran a scavenger hunt that generated seven million impressions of the companies’ pins, according to JetSetter’s head of social, Jonathan Goldmann.

Facebook, on the other hand, noisily lost GM as an advertiser earlier this year and is currently struggling with how many brand messages users should see on the site … and how much companies should pay for the privilege. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, of course, very publicly dumped on Facebook just a month ago when he realized how few of his Dallas Mavericks followers actually saw any of the Mavs posts. Now Pinfluencer is showing companies just how to engage with followers on Pinterest — and boost both followers and viral views … and eventually sales.

Sharad Verma, Pinfluencer’s chief executive, talked to me a few days ago about his new platform, which has delivered 25 million total impressions for the 50 companies in the beta program.

“There are four types of promotions on Pinterest,” he said. “First, asking users to come to your website and pin the products they like; second: creating a board and pre-populating it with pins, asking users to re-pin; third: creating a scavenger hunt; and fourth: running daily winner contests for prizes for those who pin your content.”

Using them wisely, he said, is helping brands get a huge increase in followers and brand-associated pins. There’s a reason for that, according to Verma.

“Pinterest contests are fun and creative,” Verma told me. “They’re very open-ended, not forcing you to do something you wouldn’t want to do. You simply pin products from a website.”

And that in turn generates a lot of eyeballs, clickthroughs, and sales.

“This is better than Facebook. Facebook is really about conversation and brand awareness,” he said, adding that Pinterest drives sales.

Naturally, Verma has a vested interest in Pinterest: His entire company is built around the marketing and analytics for the site, which might make his impressions a little suspect. But he’s not the only one singing this song.

Separately, retailers such as Indigo have used Pinterest to drive increased social sharing and a 50 percent bump in sales from social traffic compared to other sources. And a wider sample of retailers found that Pinterest drives more revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter. More recently, RichRelevance found that while Facebook is still driving more clicks to retailers, Pinterest, which has started growing again after leveling off this summer, is where the big spenders are coming from.

Fortunately for brands that have invested in massive Facebook fan counts, Pinfluencer has a tool in its kit:

“Marketers can host their contests and sweepstakes on a Facebook tab powered by Pinfluencer and convert their Facebook fans into avid pinners on Pinterest,” Verma said in a statement.

Which means Pinterest certainly can be a part of any brand’s social story, even if that brand is already heavily invested in Facebook.

Shoutlet is putting the $15 million it raised in June to good use.

The company announced today the latest version of its social marketing platform, which promises to make the lives of marketers significantly easier.

Chief among the platform’s new features is integration with Facebook’s social ad platform, which allows marketers to create and manage their Facebook page posts from a single hub. To bring some of these features, Shoutlet is partnering with ad tech company Kenshoo, whose Social platform gives marketers tons more insight into their traffic and sales conversions.

Shoutlet has also added some more robust integration with analytics tools from Google and Omniture, which marketers can use to cross-reference traffic numbers across multiple data sources. Alongside that, Shoutlet is also adding some pretty robust social listening tools — valuable additions for marketers looking to hear what the world is saying about their brands.

But the feature Shoultlet CEO Jason Weaver says he’s most excited about is Shoultlet’s contest tool, which he says is the best in the market. With the tool, marketers can now run an unlimited number of contests, tailoring each one to the age, location, or language of participants.

Unsurprisingly, Weaver says at the core of Shoutlet 6.0 is integration. “We’ve noticed that a lot of our clients are still struggling to understand how their various tools work together. Things are still very fragmented,” he told VentureBeat.

That, he says, is where the value proposition of Shoutlet comes in. By codifying all the social media marketer’s tools in one integrated package, Shoutlet aims to make the whole job significantly simpler. “Our goal still is to make a beautifully integrated platform ” Weaver said.

LocBox wants to be the alternative to Groupon, Living Social and the host of flash sales sites, and has raised over $5 million in its quest to win over small businesses.

The San Francisco-based startup helps businesses run marketing campaigns. The idea is that Groupon and the like can pull customers into a store to pick up a one-off promotion, but they can’t drive long-term loyalty.

Founder Saumil Mehta said he would inspired to create a product that his parents, both small business-owners, would actually use.

“I called hundreds local businesses early last year and discovered that they really needed help with sustainable revenue and foot traffic from loyal and new customers,” Mehta told me. He explained that traditional methods and channels (Yellow Pages, for instance) are no longer reliable but the channels were either overwhelming, unsustainable, or had tenuous return on investment (ROI).

Prior to founding the company, Mehta was the director of product at Kosmix, a social media technology that was later acquired by Wal-Mart.

“I decided to help them [small businesses] by building a product,’ Mehta continued. Using LocBox, businesses can better organize their efforts if Twitter, Facebook and email content is pulled into a single dashboard. In its beta phase, the technology is currently used by several hundred customers (primarily health spas and small medical practices) who have run thousands of campaigns.

The market is flooded with email and social media marketing tools that cater to small businesses, including MailChimp and Constant Contact. Many of these tools offer sophisticated analytics on the front-end so customers can tell if their campaigns are actually working. Mehta claims to have “better targeting algorithms” than the competition.

Sign up to the site, and a potential customer will receive an overview of their current online and social media presence, and a recommendation for a marketing and social media campaign. If they decide to run it, LocBox offers a flexible price that is based on previous, similar campaigns.

It’s a crowded space, but investors see a gap in the market for this kind of consolidated dashboard. Investors in the round include InterWest Partners, Google Ventures and 500Startups, with additional investments from angel investors including Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan of WalmartLabs, and Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience at LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

Marketing software company VerticalResponse surveyed almost 500 small businesses, finding that 66 percent are spending more time on social media this year than last.

In fact, more than half of small business owners and managers spend more than an hour a week on social media, and a staggering 43 percent spend more than six hours every week blogging, sharing, and tweeting about their business. Those are massive numbers — I’ve spent some time in the local search industry working with small business owners, and many were not willing to look at Facebook and Twitter for even 15 minutes as little as two years ago.

More than half have a blog and, as mentioned above, most are on Facebook and Twitter.

But small businesses are virtually ignoring LinkedIn (participation at just 4 percent), Google+ (3 percent), and Pinterest (one percent). In other words, owners and managers are still very focused in their digital market efforts … and that’s likely leaving some vast untapped resources for savvy marketers.

There are some, however, who wish that social media wasn’t such a high-maintenance squeeze. A full third wished they’d like to spend less time on social media … which, I suppose, means that they are not yet seeing the kinds of returns that justify their investment.

Even so, the number of small businesses that have increased their social media budgets is four times higher than those that have decreased their budgets. So something is definitely working.

Full details here in the infographic:

photo credit: Vainsang via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This week, 100 employees received layoffs at Radian6, a company Salesforce acquired two years ago.

Salesforce called it a “rebalancing of resources” at Marketing Cloud, the new software suite that Salesforce created from Radian6 and Buddy Media, another relatively recent acquisition. But some in the media immediately reported “signs of trouble,” and referred to Buddy Media as a “money pit.”

Marc Benioff: Not crazy after all.

The layoffs reportedly occurred at Radian6, but within hours, Buddy Media found itself at the center of the storm. Business Insider released a snapshot of the company’s financials from the June 2011-2012 period, when it was still a venture-backed private company, and reported that it was “bleeding money” in the months prior to the $689 million acquisition.

Reality check: After two acquisitions of companies in a similar space, layoffs are a matter of course. Logically speaking, this creates some overlap of personnel.

“When you acquire two companies, it makes sense to slash a lot of jobs that are replicating each other,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at Altimeter Research. “How many managers or HR managers do you need on the same account?”

Salesforce is a public company and needs to make sure it’s still in the black — “downsizing the overhead makes sense at this time,” he added.

Adding to the speculation that Salesforce is in trouble, its competitors took the opportunity to offer the recently laid-off employees a job (most of the scale backs were in marketing and sales). View the comments here.

Still, the layoffs are not necessarily a vindication for competitors like Oracle and Adobe.

It’s also not out of the ordinary for a venture-backed software as a service (SaaS) company to overspend, then concentrate on monetization at a later stage. Before this summer’s acquisition, Buddy Media was still a private company in growth mode.

In response to the spate of recent articles that question Marc Benioff’s judgment, experts say it will be at least six months before we will say how the acquisition plays out.

“It’s just too premature to make a call,” said Jim Moore, the founder and managing director of J. Moore Partners, a M&A advisory firm. “If the layoffs were on the administrative, sales and marketing side, I don’t see any reason to say these acquisitions have not been successful.”

Salesforce declined to comment for this story beyond this official statement:

With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.

Top image via Sarah Deer. Benioff photo: VentureBeat.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

According to Salesforce.com, a crowd of 90,000 people will gather in San Francisco tomorrow morning to listen in to the keynote address from the company’s outspoken CEO, Marc Benioff. This number may be a slight exaggeration, but nonetheless it signals the company is not just a customer relationship management (CRM) giant in the eyes of the tech community.

Salesforce made five acquisitions this year as it expands its suite of tools to every corner of the enterprise, fueling an endless stream of rumors. Who will they buy next? No doubt, this will be a major talking point at the conference, alongside discussions about how the company will integrate the startups it recently acquired.

Tech conferences can be overwhelming, so we compiled talking points for you. Whether you’re planning to attend or are simply curious, here’s what to expect at Dreamforce 2012.

“Chatter” and cloud storage — Who will Salesforce.com acquire?

Salesforce‘s CEO Marc Benioff’s knows how to command the attention of a room; he dropped a bomb at Disrupt last week in San Francisco. Immediately following an enterprise panel featuring cloud service providers, Box and Okta, he announced the introduction of two competing products.

“We are not trying to snuff competitors out,” he said, shortly after making the announcement. Benioff also hinted that the company would add file-storage features to Chatter, the social enterprise tool that is similar to Microsoft-owned Yammer. The tool is called ChatterBox — a nod to potential competitor, Box?

As it typically does, Salesforce may be gearing up for an acquisition. Rumors abounded that Box would be the primary target. I hopped on the phone with Box’s CEO Aaron Levie who responded with a firm “absolutely not”. Levie told me that Salesforce might be entering into the cloud storage space, but that few companies truly understand the value of file sharing and collaboration.

Putting the rumors to bed, a spokesperson from Salesforce told me to expect news about Dropbox, Box’s primary competitor. An integration, perhaps? Expect plenty of discussion around Chatter and new file storage capabilities.

What’s next for Buddy Media? 

Salesforce’s most expensive buy was Buddy Media, which it picked up for $689 million in August. Buddy Media is one of the biggest makers of social media tools for the enterprise. The result is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a social networking platform for marketing. This was integrated with technology gained from both Buddy Media and Radian6, a social media monitoring provider.

Marketing Cloud is expected to be officially announced Wednesday morning by Benioff during his keynote address.

Do.com is hotting up!

Do.com, Salesforce’s productivity tool that competes with Asana, recently upgraded its product with a host of new features. Do also recently graduated from being a free app to a fremium service. Led by Manymoon’s founder (a startup acquired by Salesforce last year), it recently announced its first huge customer: Google.

Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s senior VP told VentureBeat last month that Do.com signed up several hundred thousand users with “zero dollars spent on marketing.” With skyrocketing adoption rates, the company will be looking for ways to monetize the service.

In addition, Benioff mentioned Do.com at Disrupt last week, so I expect to hear more from him on this topic at Dreamforce.

Will they revive Force.com?

Salesforce may have talked it up, but as industry analyst Ray Wang told Computer World, Force.com is not particularly intuitive or easy to use. We may not hear any announcements this year, but it’s a good conversation topic to raise with fellow conference-goers. During panels, ask questions about whether the company will invest in its development.

Marc Benioff photo: Dell/Flickr

Last we heard from Shoutlet, the company had raised $15 million to make social media marketing easier. Today, Shoutlet is furthering its cause with the addition of Foursquare to its suite of supported social networks.

Shoutlet makes it easy for companies to run their own social marketing campaigns on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. With the inclusion of Foursquare, Shoutlet becomes a more valuable tool for businesses looking to get more information on who is visiting and checking-in.

“There’s a hidden goldmine of activity on Foursquare that marketers are eager to tap into,” Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver told VentureBeat.

Using the new Foursquare integration, marketers will able to keep a close eye on key Foursquare metrics like check-ins, tips, and mayorships. That information can then be used schedule and run better-researched promotions and campaigns directly through Shoutlet.

While that’s helpful on its own, it’s made more so by Shoutlet’s capability to tie the Foursquare actions into other social networks. So, marketers can, for example, tweet out promotions when a certain number of customers check-in. It’s a powerful, multilayer tool that Weaver says is going to be invaluable to marketers.

“It’s one of the most exciting integrations we’ve done,” Weaver said.