Brand's Social Life? Learn how to manage it!

Ad Age Trend Report Explores Strategies for Social-Media Platforms, Organizing Your Team and What to Measure

By:Jenna Schnuer

Consumers are investing serious amounts of their time in social-media platforms, with 16.6% of all online minutes now spent on social networks. With so much focus on social as a marketing tool, it's worth stopping and mapping out a smart social strategy.


A new Ad Age Insights report, "Managing Your Brand's Social Life," aims to help brand managers plan for which platforms should get the investment of limited staff and time, what to consider when creating internal social-media guidelines, whether to handle social media in-house or outsource it and what measures a brand should be looking for to get at return on investment.

You can measure the ROI of social media, but it may not get you far. "There is definitely a quantifiable ROI, but the truth of the matter is that it's very difficult to measure ROI within social media," said Edelman Digital Senior VP Michael Brito.

If a straightforward numbers game is what you're after, Olivier Blanchard, author of "Social Media ROI" notes that the ROI numbers game remains the same: "It's still purely a financial measure." But, he adds, "engagement is not a measure of ROI. There's no way to actually calculate the relationship between a dollar investment in a particular activity and the number of likes."

Managing Your Brand's Social Life

Strategies for Social Media Platforms, Organizing Your Team And What to Measure

He stresses that brands should be wary of anybody who tries to tell them that they can put an absolute value on a Facebook fan, Twitter follower or their latest Pinterest pinner. "For anyone to suggest that the value of a Coca-Cola fan on Facebook or Twitter is equal to the value of a BMW fan on Facebook or Twitter, it's ludicrous. So the media-equivalency equations unfortunately really lead people astray. They do help sell a lot of services, but they don't actually really give you a true measure of the value of an activity on social media," Mr. Brito said.

Adds Constant Contact's Social-Media Manager Erica Ayotte: "What's really hard is determining the value of followership." Instead, Ms. Ayotte believes brands have to ask very different questions of their social-media campaigns. "What gets me really excited is looking at it from a different intelligence perspective, from taking all that data and being able to ask the right questions, " she said. "For example, do people who are engaging with us on Facebook ... do they buy more, stay longer? That's the type of business intelligence ... I think the whole industry is moving [toward]." Other aspects to consider tracking are trust, purchase-decisions influence, seeking new products and getting recommendations.

ROI is really just one way to figure out how much your brand benefits from having a social life. With a little creativity -- and with an understanding that you need to push your measurement in new directions -- you can more clearly understand what social media delivers to your brand. Steven L. Johnson, assistant professor and director of social-media programs at Temple University's Fox School of Business, offered the example of the Campbell's Kitchen Facebook page, whose "mission is to get people to use more Campbell's Soup products." Mr. Johnson said Campbell figured out that every time somebody printed a recipe from Facebook, they prepared it approximately 2.5 times, and 1.7 times, they used a Campbell's Soup product. "You can't figure that out online," he said. "They just figured that out through some kind of additional market research. But then based on that, you're able to put a value on this action that you're trying to drive people toward."

While larger marketers end up building enterprise-class tracking tools, many companies rely on a cobbled together set of tools. Some of the top names in the measuring game include Radian6; Webtrends analytics to measure Facebook and mobile; and Twitalyze to measure, as you probably guessed, Twitter activity; Google Analytics, which is a very sophisticated product (especially for the price of ... free); and Simply Measured, which also looks at competitors' engagement to provide benchmarking.


"Measuring social is easy: likes, comments, views, shares, engagement, participation, etc. The numbers are all there and are easy to pull. Determining success is still the difficult part," said Daniel Stein, founder-CEO, Evolution Bureau. "The jury is still out on the value of fan interaction. Most people agree that having a loyal, engaged fan base is a good thing -- how good or how valuable compared to other forms of more institutionalized marketing is still debatable."

Source:
Advertising Age Online
http://www.adage.com

Is There Such a Thing as Hispanic Identity? Despite All the Variety, Yes

A Pew Study Shows That Certain Values Will Outlast Shifts That Come With Acculturation

By: David Morse

Published: April 13, 2012

Is there such a thing as a common Hispanic culture? The Pew Hispanic Center just released a study suggesting that, considering how Hispanics identify themselves, the answer may be no.


We know there is great diversity within the U.S. Hispanic population. Pew's biggest finding is the paucity of U.S. Hispanics who identify with the label "Hispanic" or "Latino." Only a quarter. Half of Hispanics identify more strongly with their family's country of origin. And another 21% said that they use the term "American" most often to describe themselves. When asked whether Hispanics have many different cultures or if they share a common culture, 69% indicated the former.

Are we then fooling ourselves when we attempt to market to a segment that we call Hispanic, but that doesn't perceive itself that way? I don't think so.

Much in the study suggests that a common Hispanic culture does exist. Some 95% of Hispanics believe it is important for future generations of U.S. Hispanics to speak Spanish, an interesting finding given that less than half of third-generation Hispanics indicated that they speak Spanish. But 87% say that it is important for Hispanic immigrants to learn English.

Some things, like language and identity, change with acculturation. Two-thirds of Hispanic immigrants in the study say that they think in Spanish, while 80% of third-generation Hispanics answered that they think in English. Two-thirds of the native born responded that they think of themselves as typical Americans, while two-thirds of the foreign born said that they were "very different" from typical Americans.

Yet the study reveals that other things, such as attitudes and values, have more staying power. For instance, with acculturation, Hispanics are more likely to agree that most people can be trusted. Yet even third-generation Hispanics are much less likely to agree than the general population. Similarly, third-generation Hispanics were much more likely than the general population to agree that people can get ahead with hard work or that bigger government is a good thing.

For more acculturated Hispanics, it may be their values, rather than the traditional markers of ethnicity, such as language and cultural differences, that set them apart from the mainstream. First and foremost may be the importance of family. When asked to compare life in the United States to their country of origin, the United States fared better on all measures but one: "the strength of family ties."

As a higher and higher percentage of the U.S. Hispanic population is native born, the traditional approaches of targeting Hispanics -- language and culture -- will become more difficult. As the Pew study demonstrates, those born in the United States will identify themselves increasingly as American, especially as the term becomes less associated with "white." They will come to prefer English. But it will be a long time before family ceases to be a central part of their identity.

That Hispanics are family-oriented has become a well worn cliche, and the image of "abuelita" (grandma) has been overused by Hispanic marketers. Yet as we grapple with the question of how to target the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants now and in the future, it seems clear that appealing to Hispanic values will play a prominent role, precisely because they are the most durable aspects of Hispanic identity.

Yes, Hispanics are diverse, but there is much to be found in the Pew study to support the argument that despite the myriad variations -- country of origin, acculturation and socioeconomics -- there is a common culture. Central to that culture is a belief in hard work, the valuation of the Spanish language and at the top of the list, love of family. The art of developing targeted messages for Hispanics will evolve as the demographics of the population change. But it will take a lot more than three generations for marketing communications evoking these traditional Hispanic cultural pillars to lose their power.

SOURCE

AdAge. Retrieved from: http://adage.com/article/the-big-tent/great-variety-hispanic-identity-exist/234082/