Simon Pardoe - Marketing & Business Development

In recent times you may have seen a new logo / click option appearing on certain websites – see picture to the left.  Google +1 (pronounced Google plus one) was launched in March 2011 and is a brand new addition to the all conquering Google search engine. In essence, +1 is Google’s way of making search results a little more personal and is very similar to Facebook’s ‘like’ button or Twitter’s ‘tweet’ button – but with a new twist. It appears on Google search results and can influence rankings and therefore should most definitely be part of everyone’s Search Engine Optimisation programme.

So how does Google +1 actually work?

Just think of +1′s as votes. Whenever someone +1′s a website, it counts as a sort of recommendation and shows up next to the page in Google’s search results.  Google created +1 in order to try to give its users a better experience. At the end of the day, Google wants to provide quality and relevant content for their users and +1 is Google’s first major step in making their search engine a more “fair”, friendly and social place.

This is how Google describes how they see +1 working from a ‘potential’ cutomer’s perspective:

Google +1 is being incorporated into Google’s algorithm, therefore influencing websites rankings all over the web. How much +1 will account for a website’s rankings remains to be seen and it’s perfectly possible that it will not catch widely enough to have a major impact. However, it’s definitely a good idea to install the +1 button on your website.

A flood of innovation involving smart phones, social media and local search will soon have a massive impact on what travelers do and how they spend their money while on holiday, according to a new study from a leading travel market research firm.

The report found that U.S. travelers last year spent a total of $26.8 billion on tours, skiing, sports events, amusement parks, spas, museums, zoos, concerts and other cultural and recreational activities.

The study, entitled “When They Get There, and Why They Go,” is soon to be released by PhoCusWright Inc. The firm surveyed 1,283 consumers, 340 suppliers of events and activities and 45 industry executives about the U.S. travel activities marketplace.

“Mobile technologies, social networks and location-based search are already having a huge effect on consumers’ trip planning. But the impact is going to be even more profound going forward as we reach a tipping point in the adoption of smart phones and tablet PCs,” said Jon Schepke, President of SIM Partners.  SIM Partners, a Chicago-based interactive marketing agency, is a sponsor of the PhoCusWright study.

In 2012, shipments of smart phones are expected to exceed PC shipments for the first time.  Additionally, iSuppli forecasts iPad sales at 43.7 million units in 2011 and 63.3 million in 2012, reinforcing the importance of being focused on mobile computing and application development (iPhone/iPad, Android etc.).

“These trends offer travel marketers new and cost-efficient ways of connecting with consumers before, during and after their trips,” Schepke said. “Consumers will be able to access targeted information, promotions and offers when they need them most and are making decisions, so they are more likely to buy.”

He cautioned that destinations, hotels and travel attractions should have a mobile marketing strategy in place now to adapt to the fast-changing digital landscape and ensure that they are well-positioned to take advantage of these opportunities. “Those who move quickly to develop engaging and consumer-friendly mobile applications will gain a significant advantage in a very competitive marketplace,” Schepke said.

The report cited mobile convergence – the explosion of GPS-empowered applications, mapping, search, digital camera, MP3 player and other capabilities available on smart phones – as a key trend that will significantly influence consumers’ future choices of activities in their travel destinations. Social media will continue to expand in importance as travelers increasingly depend on reviews, videos and personal recommendations from friends in making vacation plans and selecting activities.

Among the other findings in the report:

• Three in four active travelers use a mobile device while traveling. Two-thirds say they are likely to research, shop and book travel activities via their mobile devices.
• More than three in four active travelers cite traveler reviews and photos as very or moderately influential in choosing what to do. Nearly six in 10 cite user-generated video as influential and more than one in three cite content and promotions from companies.
• Consumers who spend the most on travel activities are the most influenced by web content such as interactive maps, blogs and social networks.
• One in two active travelers say they are likely to post comments to their social network. Four in 10 say they are likely to solicit advice from their social network.

“This study reveals that consumers are ready to embrace the mobile-social-local digital revolution,” Schepke said. “The travel industry has just scratched the surface of the powerful marketing mojo being created by itinerary tools, location-based networking, interactive mapping and other technologies. The potential is massive for reaching the right travelers with personalized offers and incentives at just the right time and place.”

Social media, web content and mobile will be the areas seeing biggest increases in travel organizations’ digital marketing activity in 2011, according to a new global survey released by digital travel online content specialists Frommer’s Unlimited, the business-to-business division of Frommers.

The survey of 325 travel organisations was undertaken with global digital travel news service Tnooz and respondents included airlines, agents, tour operators and consolidators, hoteliers, tourist boards, car rental, rail, travel insurance, publishing and cruise companies. 70% of the survey said they planned to increase digital marketing budgets for the year ahead compared to 54 % who predicted increases one year ago. Social media will see the greatest increase – 68% said they’d invest additional money, but content will also see a 63% increase in focus and mobile will see a 50% increase in activity.

Although only 7% of digital marketers said their budgets would decrease in 2011 the areas where investment are most likely to decrease is in paid activity. 13% of respondents are planning to decrease display advertising, 12% intend to reduce paid search budgets and 8% will reduce paid SEO.

Giles Longhurst, Frommer’s Unlimited director Europe Middle East and Africa said: “This is the third year we’ve undertaken this survey of digital marketing intentions and it’s clear that marketers are looking at how content creation and new applications can reach wider audiences, over and above traditional advertising. When we then drilled down and asked organizations what content was most important to them this year, search engine optimization was still by far and away the top priority, followed by high quality destination content and unique content to compliment the SEO strategy. We were also impressed to see the rapid shift in interest in mobile web and mobile apps – increasing in importance by 100 % year-on-year. Video is also seen as important by two thirds more respondents this year than last.”

Kevin May, editor of Tnooz, said: “It’s quite apparent that global content and digital marketing is changing rapidly as marketers trial and develop new services and digital solutions to deliver best impact on their bottom line. This survey clearly shows what marketers feel is delivering best return on investment in 2011.”

There is also evidence that companies are looking to more international markets this year with the number planning to invest in multi-lingual content up from 34% to 48%. Only 13% of the poll indicated they currently use Asian languages, but respondents also indicate that this will double to 26% in the future.

For the second year in a row, organisations say the top three priorities for adding content to their websites is to attract search traffic, increase conversions and build the brand. However, the problems organisations face in managing content are also similar year-on-year. The overwhelming problem facing six out of ten respondents is still keeping content up to date. Creating content which is consistent with brand values was highlighted by almost five out of ten of the survey sample and integrating content with products was a problem for four out of ten surveyed.

I’ve come across many people who think that Twitter is a waste of time.  Indeed, for many it is.  However, whilst it’s still so popular (and growing exponentially every day) it’s worth considering as part of an overall marketing campaign as it most definitely can be a valuable ingredient.  For those businesses that already have Facebook Fan Pages there’s no need to devote any time at all to Twitter, apart from setting up an account.  Simply add a re-broadcast app to your Fan Page and all Facebook Fan messages are automatically fired off to your Twitter site and then on to your followers on Twitter. Job done.

Most business owners and, indeed, many marketing people are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of these channels with many giving it a go but forgetting to track and measure the results properly.  So, herewith some useful Twitter tools….

But first:  remember that Twitter is primarily about conversation.  It’s about engaging with your followers in a fun and useful way.  It’s not just about bombarding them with sales offers or marketing pitches (otherwise they’ll just ignore you or ‘unfollow’ you).  Occasional marketing messages are fine and a good benchmark would be one or two tweets in every 10 being sales orientated.

There are tons of twitter tools that measure different statistics and some are a lot better than others.  So, if you want to start engaging with the Twitterati (because your product or service is appropriate for this form of short burst communication and there’s someone in your organisation with the time and imagination to make it effective) you’ll want to know how it’s working for you.

Here are some handy tools to discover how productive your Twitter campaigns are.

TwitterPoster – This generates an image that tells you which of your followers have the most followers, i.e. those that are most likely to spread your message further and should – if possible – be engaged with in other ways too.  Not just via Twitter or other social networking. 

TwitGraph – Useful for tracking progress of your campaign, TwitGraph provides you with data about your profile in a colourful pie chart format.

TwitterGrader — Ranks your profile.

TweetVolume – A great tool for discovering how many times particular words appear on Twitter.

Twitterholic — Looks at all of the twitter users in your neighbourhood and provides you with a relative ranking.

As with all such tools, it’s best to start using them the moment you establish your Twitter account in order to be able to best asses progress.

UK Facebook Statistics

The number of Facebook users continues to grow here in the UK, with over 23 million active Facebook users.

Facebook Worldwide Stats

Facebook, the worlds most popular social networking site continues to grow in 2010. Following the announcement that the site had reached over 350 million worldwide users towards the end of 2009, user numbers have continued to increase as the social networking giants continue to dominate the market.  By July 2010, the number of worldwide users has reached 474 million.

The number of Facebook users is now over 360 million and growing across the world. Over 70% of Facebook users are now outside of the United States. Below displays Facebook’s popularity by Continent.

Interesting Facebook User Statistics

Around half of all active Facebook users log into their account on any given day. More than 55 million status updates are posted each day and more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month.

Facebook Pages and Facebook Mobile

We thought, you might also like some information this time with regards to Facebook Pages. As the number of users continue to grow, so does the interest brands have in Facebook and over the past 12 months the number of Facebook Pages and groups have grown dramatically. There are now more than 1.6 million active Facebook Fan Pages which have over 5.3 billion fans. The average users becomes a fan of two pages per month.
There is no doubt that Facebook can contribute a large proportion of its usage statistics to mobile devices and social media on the go. There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and furthermore the use of Facebook by the 46.3m Opera Mini mobile users rose 600% last year research  by Opera revealed global revealed. It now means that Facebook takes the number one spot from Russian Social Network Vkontakte for being the most popular mobile social network.

More and more companies are devoting time and resources to creating and managing fan pages on facebook.  It costs next to nothing to set up (a bit of time and some creative design) and provides a very powerful mechanism for developing an on-going relationship with those customers who are active on facebook and wish to register their interest (by becoming a fan) of any particular company’s product or service.

Once the facebook fan page has been created, someone needs to be tasked with updating content and distributing news, offers, provacative thoughts etc.  This on-going content management is very important otherwise there’s no two way engagement between the company and its fans.  Those companies that get it right know what a powerful tool a facebook fan page can be.

For example, Nike Golf’s page has 222,884 fans (as of July 2010).  Therefore, whenever Nike Golf wishes to broadcast a message about a new product or a success story relating to an existing product or service, it simply drafts an appropriate message and hits the ‘share’ button.  Instantly, 222,884 fans get to see the story.  But actually it’s considerably more than this as, of course, facebook is primarily a tool for keeping in touch with friends and family all over the world.  So, for arguments sake, let’s say that each of Nike Golf’s fans have 100 friends – each one of these 100 friends multiplied by 222,884 have the possibility of (a) noticing that their friend is a fan of Nike Golf (good brand exposure!) and (b) of reading the Nike Golf messages that hit their fan friends ‘wall’ (i.e. public in-box).  That’s a potential 22 million people.  Of course, the actual number of residual viewings beyond the fans themselves is vastly less than that, but – and nobody knows this for sure – let’s say that half of one percent of the friends of Nike Golf fans notice the brand or the message, that’s still 114,442 people.

The other way of analysing the brand reach beyond the actual fan base is more of a trickle effect.  If, for example, I sign up to become a fan of Nike Golf, facebook automatically tells all my friends (be it 50 or 500) that I’ve just become a fan of Nike Golf.  And, of course, if any of my friends think that’s a good idea they may choose to become a fan too.  At the very least all my friends have been exposed to the Nike Golf brand / logo.

Whichever way you look at this, the opportunities for reaching an enormous audience are significant and, for the right brands, an opportunity not to be missed.

Health & Fitness Clubs

An analysis of the health and fitness club market indicates that this opportunity is not being grasped at all by the majority of clubs and that those that do have a presence are not keeping it updated, fresh and interesting.  Virgin Active (the Italian clubs) has over 15,000 fans and is obviously doing a great job!  Cloer to home, Pure Gym (in Edinburgh) appears to be doing the best out of all the individual clubs reviewed with 517 fans on a club membership base of around 5,000 (about 10%).  With the right content and more compelling news, offers and information, all clubs could vastly expand their audience reach.  We know people are interested in fitness.  Fitness Magazine has 46,542 fans.  And we know that the age profile of fitness club members corresponds to a core component of the facebook user profile.

Who’s doing it best?

Here’s a couple (not fitness clubs) that are worth reviewing…

One of our favourites is Innocent Drinks with nearly 20,000 fans and an excellent hands on approach to their fans and their fan page.

Lastminute.com, with approx. 70,000 fans, is brilliant at putting out special offers (as you’d expect!) and earlier today, for example, posted this on their fan page:  Thursday morning’s are a bit boring aren’t they? So we’ve teamed up with Disney/Pixar to give you some exclusive tickets to see preview screenings of Toy Story 3! We have 4 tickets to give away for each cinema listed in the Toy Story 3 tab http://bit.ly/cjicfd , first person to enter for each location wins! Just email …

Note

We thought, you might also like some information this time with regards to Facebook Pages. As the number of users continue to grow, so does the interest brands have in Facebook and over the past 12 months the number of Facebook Pages and groups have grown dramatically. There are now more than 1.6 million active Facebook Fan Pages which have over 5.3 billion fans. The average user becomes a fan of two pages per month.

Unfortunately for us Brits, the USA is somewhat more advanced in their analysis of who’s actually using facebook, twitter etc. for social networking.  However, as they say, what happens over there, tends to eventually happen over here.

A survey from the Pew Research Centre in the US says that among adults, Facebook is currently the most commonly used online social network.  Among the aged 30 and over crowd, 73% have a profile on Facebook.  Sadly, the PRC doesn’t state how far the ‘and over’ goes – all the way up to 60, 70, 80?  However, one UK survey (by Mintel, April 2010) discovered that more than four million unique internet users in the UK aged over 55 visited Facebook in the month of February 2010.

As for 18-29 year olds, 71% of them have Facebook profiles, too.

Social networking is up to 73% among teens who use the Internet a lot. That’s a big jump compared to the 55% who used the sites just three years ago.  Only 8% of them use Twitter.

More results from the report:

• Twitter is still popular with adults, ages 18 – 29, who are increasing their overall Internet use. Around 34% of adults are now on Twitter, 11% are blogging, and 47% are on social networking sites.
• In all age groups it seems that internet access is becoming more mobile. 75% of teens own cell phones, 93% of adults have a cell phone, and 81% of adults access the Internet on a wireless computer.

Everyone who creates their own facebook page knowingly completes various forms that provide personal data about themselves.  Some people provide next to no information at all, but a substantial percentage reveal a great deal of useful information such as age, sex, location, interests, hobbies, education, profession etc.

This information is stored in facebook’s vast servers and provide a advertisers with a wondeful opportunity to market their goods and services to a highly targetted audience.  Admittedly, the ads appear just to the right of the users’ facebook page but attention grabbing ads achieve just that.  They grab your attention.  If you like the look of an ad, you click on it and hyperlink through to a webpage or website of the advertisers choosing.  This is where facebook makes its money.  If you look at an ad without clicking on it, the advertiser pays nothing to facebook.  However, if you click on the ad, the advertiser pays facebook accordingly on what is known as a CPC – cost per click.  Even in the UK, advertisers pay in US dollars.  Each click ranges from a few cents through to a dollar or more.

So, let’s say you want to open, for example, a yoga studio in Manchester.  Once you’ve built your website and have created a compelling message, you could start a facebook advertising campaign.  Through facebook’s fast, efficient ad building programme you create an ‘attention grabbing’ ad and then, rather than just positioning it next to anybody and everybody who has a facebook page, you select the targetting criteria.  The targetting criteria would include, most obviously, people who live in Manchester.

Since you are opening a yoga studio, you would have done some market research about who practises yoga and would probably have discovered that yoga has become the most popular gym activity in the UK.  And the yoga market is therefore a predominantly wealthy market, as AB consumers are visiting the gym more than any other demographic. By way of an oblique illustration of this, Mintel discovered that people who practice yoga are most likely to shop in Waitrose, compared to any other supermarket.

Further, whilst there was no financial data available for UK residents, Mintel noted that in Germany the average annual wage of a yoga enthusiast was €72,000 and that there was a 70|30 bias of women to men.  The bias in the UK is nearer seven to one.

So, to further hone your facebook advertising and to maximise your marketing return on investment, you would wish to select affluent women.  (And, perhaps, hand out leaflets at the local Waitrose store!) Facebook offers options for this such as age and education.  And, should any of the affluent females who live in or near Manchester have stated ‘yoga’ as one of their recreations or hobbies, you’re likely to have found a new member – provided you have bid high enough on your CPC not to have been outsmarted (or rather, out-bid) by another yoga studio somewhere else in Manchester.

This Manchester yoga studio, looking to market their offering to women, has a further built in advantage.  Research shows that women in particular are more motivated to explore and engage with ads – particularly when they are offered a practical reason to do so.  The studio, therefore, would be well advised to offer a complimentary trial class or other special promotion in their facebook ad.