Social Media Marketing Projected to Accelerate

30 07 2010

Shortly after publishing my blog yesterday, I came across more evidence of the growing importance of Social Media in Marketing in a Brian Solis blog (highly recommended reading).

Brian Solis Blog

The blog references the CMO Survey done by Duke University and the American Marketing Association.  Link for highlights presentation.

First, some overall trends from this survey of 4,336 top marketers at Fortune 1000 and Forbes 200 companies:

  • Overall marketing budgets are projected to rise by 5.9%
  • Internet marketing is projected to rise by 12%
  • Traditional advertising spending is negative.  Down 2.5%
  • Within one year social media will be 10% of marketing budgets.  It will be nearly 18% in five years.

This is in line with the trends I have seen from other sources, but puts specific numbers on the trends.  The survey shows how the projected growth in social media marketing has increased between survey periods

Last night, I was at a mixer for new MBA students at the University of San Francisco.  There were a lot of questions about where and how much hiring there will be for marketing people.  First, the overall trends are very positive.

  • In the next 6 months, new hires will be up 8.2% over last year.
  • Next year, they will be up 12.9%
  • In the next two years, they will be up 24.1%

The survey says that hiring companies will hire for experience more than for than for people from universities.  That means that doing real-world work is critical.  The top skills listed for marketing hires are strongly focused on Internet marketing, Growth, CRM and Brand Management.

Finally, a good number of firms said that they would be outsourcing marketing functions.  The survey suspects that a lot of this will be for Internet Marketing skills that they may not have in-house.  That means that there will also be a great deal of opportunity for jobs with smaller services companies that provide outsourced marketing functions to larger organizations.

The survey is being given again in August 2010.  I will be very interested to see if the current CMO optimism holds up in the changing economic conditions.


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Categories : Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media, Social Media Data, Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing to Grow at 34%

29 07 2010

I just ran across a Forrester Research projection that Social Media Marketing spending will hit $3.1 Billion by 2014.  That’s interesting, but here is the really interesting news to this projection:

  • Social Media Marketing will grow at an annual rate of 34% for the next five years.
  • Online advertising in total is growing at 21%
  • This means that conventional advertising is falling in absolute terms.

This is not totally surprising, especially to anybody who reads this blog, but it is interesting how quickly the change has come.  I am teaching a course in MBA Marketing this fall and the course books have not caught up with how quickly and fundamentally this trend has changed the professional practice of Marketing.

There are some really good reasons for the rise of Social Media Marketing

  • Social Media Marketing costs less.  Let’s dispel the myth that SMM is “free.”  It takes experienced people and intelligence to do SMM well, but it still costs far less than conventional advertising methods.
  • Social Media Marketing is more appreciated by customers. SMM is not about carefully crafting a message, interrupting people, and ramming the message down their throats.  It is about providing value.
  • Social Media Marketing is more effective.  The core of SMM is to provide compelling content that target customers want to see.  In return, customers find out about your offering and your  brand reputation is enhanced.  Interrupt-driven advertising is increasingly hurting brand reputation.  Brand building is about being seen as useful, helpful and/or entertaining.
  • Social Media Marketing is more about listening than talking.  In the process, brands have the opportunity to build customer relationships and really hear what customers want.

The change is accelerating because the economics of SMM are so compelling.  The challenge for many companies will be the ability to make the cultural change to an almost entirely new style of relating to customers.


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Microsoft & Cloud Computing

12 07 2010

Microsoft just announced at their developer conference today that they will license the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform for the first time to service providers.  This includes:

  • Windows Azure
  • Microsoft SQL Azure
  • Microsoft-specified hardware

The announcement included partnership announcements with Dell, Fujitsu and HP in support of the Azure announcements.

Some interesting projections from IDC jumped out of this announcement:

  • Cloud computing will drive 19% of the growth in software spending 2013-2014
  • Cloud growth will be 26% annually – 5X the industry growth rate for software

Note that there are other components in the Microsoft Azure platform.  Just a guess, but it seems reasonable to expect that at least some of these components may also become available to platform partners over time.


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Categories : Cloud Computing, Technology, Uncategorized

Free Web Analytics: Quantcast

8 07 2010

I am always on the lookout for free tools to use in marketing and social media marketing campaigns and just ran across a good one the other day: Quantcast.com.

If you need to put together a preliminary marketing plan that includes the Web and social media (and who doesn’t?) here is a great way to get started and get the data you need to justify your plan.

Some of the available Quantcast features:

  • Input a Web site and they will give you a profile of traffic and demographics of the site users.  This did not work on sub domains that I tried.
  • Compare the traffic graphically on two different sites.
  • Input your own Web site and information and get a free more detailed analysis of the traffic and demographics on your site.

Example: I input Cisco.com and got the following information:

  • Estimated monthly traffic to the site
  • Demographics: M/F, Age, Race, Kids, Income and Education
  • Affinity: Quantcast shows other categories of sites that visitors to Cisco.com are likely to visit.

This is some pretty useful and powerful stuff for free. My take on this is that the free services actually look very useful.

  • Quantcast Publisher: copy the Quantcast tags into your published Web pages and they will do detailed analysis and reports for your site.
  • Quantcast Marketer: Profiles your current Web site audience.  Can recommend similar user audiences to market to in campaigns.
  • Quantcast Planner: Search Web properties in realtime, analyze them, and purchase buy the audience that most closely matches yours.

Note that the service is for USA sites only – at least for now.

Quantcast Top 20 US Sites

Rank Site Description
1 google.com 159M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more youthful, more affluent, more educated audience.
2 facebook.com 145M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a younger, fairly wealthy, slightly female slanted audience.
3 yahoo.com 122M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more affluent crowd.
4 youtube.com 109M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a younger crowd.
5 msn.com 77M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, fairly wealthy audience.
6 wikipedia.org 75M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more affluent, slightly male slanted, younger, more educated group.
7 live.com 74M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more educated, fairly wealthy audience.
8 amazon.com 72M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more educated, fairly wealthy crowd.
9 microsoft.com 71M+ U.S. monthly people.
10 ebay.com 59M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a fairly wealthy, very slightly male biased audience.
11 aol.com 59M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a slightly female slanted, more affluent, youthful audience.
12 blogspot.com 58M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a fairly wealthy, more educated, slightly male slanted audience.
13 weather.com 55M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more educated, more affluent audience.
14 blogger.com 52M+ U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a fairly wealthy, more educated, slightly male slanted crowd.
15 ask.com 50M+ U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a slightly more female than male audience.
16 craigslist.org 50M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a slightly male slanted, more affluent following.
17 bing.com 48M+ U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a more youthful, fairly wealthy following.
18 myspace.com 46M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a teen and young adult, slightly female slanted audience.
19 about.com 45M+ U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a very slightly female biased, more educated, fairly wealthy audience.
20 ehow.com 44M+ U.S. monthly people.

Compare the Quantcast service to Amazon.com’s Alexa which also provides free Web site analytics.


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Categories : Social Media Marketing, Technology, Web Analytics

iPhone Gets Press, Android Gets Market Share

8 07 2010

No knock on Apple here.  They have some run-away best sellers going:

The interesting news is that while all this is going on,  comScore’s latest numbers on smartphone platform market share show Apple iOS declining slightly while Google’s Android market share grew 4 percentage points.

Important caveats:

  • The time period was the three months ending in May
  • This does not include iPhone 4 sales
  • It also does not include iPad.  Not a smartphone

The key thing to note that while all the major players are growing in absolute terms, Apple pre-iPhone 4 was not gaining market share.  It will be interesting to see what happens now that the iPhone 4 has shipped.

Full comScore numbers


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Categories : Business Models, Cloud Computing, Mobile, Technology

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