The fact that marketing experts are transferring advertising budgets from conventional platforms to social networks and online marketing confirms the existence of a potential market that will begin to demand Competitive Intelligence services based on active listening methodologies, or as I have coined in previous post, Active Intelligence.
50% of the people who use the internet are users of Social Networks as published by InSites Consulting. While Social Networks have shown an annual expansion of 80% in recent years (more than 945 million people during 2010 according to a report developed by ComScore), Twitter grows around 300 thousand new users per day, according to the SmashSummit statements. Additionally, it must be said that Spain is the first country in Europe in percentage of Internet users on Social Networks and the ninth in Facebook users.
In this sense, Franck Scipion (expert in Social Networks, eMarketing and former Deloitte consultant) from Income square told me (via Twitter) that companies that want to be successful have to be where their customers are, because after all, business they are relationships.
In this way, given that customers have an increasing presence on the Internet, the keys to the new marketing to establish and maintain relationships with their customers have to go through Web 2.0 (blogs, online social networks, digital video platforms, microblogging, etc.) as channels through which to carry out a business orientation towards the client. And faced with this, CI experts must get involved and be part of the process. Furthermore, Competitive Intelligence aimed at anticipating the movements of the competition and the needs of customers, has to integrate analysis methodologies based on Competitive Intelligence 2.0 (Active Intelligence).
The form of communication between people and between companies and their customers is changing rapidly, and companies that do not ride the 2.0 wave will be dissipated in a past and obsolete business model. Today it is the 2.0 model and tomorrow it will be the X.0, but to understand it, master it and make it profitable, we must do the same with the previous one.
Social Networks are a reality. They are a fashion, but they are also a trend that is consolidated day by day. The concept of connectivity, of communicating and sharing the events of our lives in real time is what is really important. Today we do it through platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, Tuenti, Twitter, etc. Tomorrow it may be other platforms, but the essence of Social Media is not a passing fad. Just as it would no longer be possible to imagine a world without the Internet, it will not be possible (if it is not already) to live without “Social Connectivity”.
Consumers are now digital
As they pointed out at the Navarra Internet Meeting in Baluarte, consumers are now digital. About 80% of users trust the recommendations of friends ("You buy from people you like"), so the strategy of brands in this virtual environment has to be bidirectional, personalized and innovative.
However, and faced with such an obvious reality, a few days ago I was reading an article published by a work colleague on our company's corporate blog, entitled Social networks: as necessary as they say? I would dare to answer YES and much more than it might seem.
Actually, it is not personal opinion that concerns me most. After all, we live in a world of free will and where everyone has the right to express themselves freely. The disturbing thing, from my point of view, is that this is the opinion conveyed from the blog of a consulting and intelligence center where anticipation is supposed to be the hallmark of their services.
Develop strategies with a projective vision is the best argument to develop the positioning 'future' of companies and their brands. This is the path that Social Networks are taking, with the additional advantage of being low-cost or even zero-cost tools. As a consequence, accessible to practically the entire business universe and therefore those of us who work in Competitive Intelligence should not question the current and future potential of Web 2.0.
Here are some figures, facts and opinions of experts and important Community Managers in Spain so that you can draw your own conclusions about the importance of Social Networks for companies. Both for promotion and positioning of their brands and to have Competitive Intelligence systems that allow them to develop reputation maps on the Internet of their competitors:
Figures
• Internet currently represents the third medium in advertising investment in Spain and with double-digit growth compared to the falls of conventional advertising. In the UK, for example, online advertising with a 24% share is the first medium.
• Brand recall soars 30% thanks to the Facebook wall, according to the study “Effectiveness of advertising campaigns: the value of social networks”, jointly prepared by Nielsen Online. The report confirms that recall, brand awareness and even purchase intention grow directly proportional to the personal link that the user shows on the social network about that product, service or brand (read the news here).
• Another study on more than 450 large companies carried out by King Fish Media, Hubspot and Junta 42 affirms that more than 70% of these companies have a marketing strategy in Social Networks, while 80% of those who do not have it plan to have it within the next 12 months. In addition, not only do they have or plan to have a strategy in Social Networks, but 75% of those consulted also plan to increase their advertising investment. (download the e-book Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think? here).
• A recent study by ExactTarget revealed that consumers who are active on Twitter are three times more likely to impact a brand's online reputation than the average consumer, through sponsored tweets, blog posts and product reviews.
Some acts
• Delta Airlines launches ticket sales directly on Facebook.
• Mango debuts in technology 2.0 in September. It will remodel its shopping portal and will introduce new functionalities adapted to 2.0, including a search engine, user opinion, suggestions to improve the product and integration with social networks.
• Zara opens its online store on September 2 and conquers Facebook. Those who live in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom will be able to buy their Zara products directly from the web. Zara has nearly 3.7 million fans on Facebook, the most important virtual community in the world.
• Mixta's repositioning campaign. The work that was done to revitalize the network was intensive: viral sites, video sites, premiere of two video formats in Tuenti, use of spontaneous profiles that were created on Facebook,… The results corresponded to the effort: the internet provided the 11% notoriety among young people with only 2% of the budget.
Opinions of Experts and Community Managers
• Juan Merodio, recognized expert in Online Marketing and Social Networks, founder of Grupo Ellas, argues that Social Networks are necessary for companies among many other things because 78% of people heed the recommendations of others, because they generate more visits to the company's website and therefore, brand recall and recognition, and because they help customer loyalty thanks to personalized attention and real-time problem solving that increase the user's affinity with the brand, increasing thus their feeling towards her.
• Jérôme Massebeuf, CEO of Tribal Fusion believes that advertising in the digital medium will continue to grow and will capture a large part of the investment because it continues to increase the audience and the time that people dedicate to the medium. Marketing directors in other markets such as the UK already concentrate most of their budgets on the Internet according to Carlos Bravo, CEO of Coguan.
• The Internet is already much more used than the press in those under 45 years of age, to whom most of the advertising campaigns are aimed. Events like this continue to generate transfers of advertising investment from other media to the Internet, comments César Núñez, Addoor General Director (read the full opinions here).
• For Fiat, social networks are an opportunity to find a young audience to become addicted to the brand. But you have to do it in a non-intrusive way and with attractive content.
• Francisco Rodríguez Cervantes, interactive & CRM manager at Coca-Cola maintains that strategies as simple as the Tuenti birthday greeting application or more complex strategies such as the recent search for happiness campaign can be approached on Social Networks.
A few days ago Enrique Dans (professor at IE Business School), a leader in Social Networks in Spain, commented on the Delta Airlines initiative that this fact is beginning to make clear the true potential of the social network… “For the networks From being the fastest growing medium in advertising to also becoming important players in transactional environments is a matter of capital importance, which fully defines its dimension as an economic and social phenomenon. Undoubtedly, Delta's initiative is not going to be unique: shortly we will begin to see a large number of companies offering their products within social networks - companies go wherever their customers are - and, surely, to social networks offering mechanisms to accommodate the development of this activity. " (read the full post here).
A study by Microsoft Advertising shows that Premium item brands lose up to 50% of audience due to their dependence on demographic segmentation, typical of offline techniques. It shows that although these techniques - such as billboards or TV and print advertising - are important tools for increasing brand awareness, online techniques are also essential.
The data indicates the power of online media to improve brand equity, as it has been shown that the average time spent by an individual in an online ad is 53 seconds, which is equivalent to seeing two ads in a row on TV. (read the article here)
Final reflection
In Social Networks companies are or are. By this I mean that if they do it actively they will be able to draw their profile on the different Social Networks and maintain a diligent dialogue with their clients. However, if they decide on a passive online policy, their reputation and that of their brands will remain in the hands of netizens, since someone will always be talking about each and every one of the existing companies and their products even when they do not want to. participate in the conversation.
For this reason the monitoring of everything related to the company and its brands, both in the real and virtual world, is essential in competitive scenarios such as current ones.
Now that you have seen part of the potential of Social Networks, tell me if you think online reputation management and its analysis through Active Competitive Intelligence Systems is not essential?
