This week, Forrester announced a new segment to be added to the Social Technographics Profiles – the Conversationalists. Conversationalists are social media users who update their status on Twitter or a social networking site (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) at least once a week. They are less involved than Creators, who write blogs, create content, or publish websites. But they are more expressive than Critics who simply post reviews, comment on others’ blogs, or contribute to forums.

The newly updated Forrester Social Technographics Ladder (Note: Segments are not mutually exclusive, therefore the percentages do not add up to 100%).

There were two other important insights in the Social Technographics update from Forrester:

• The new Conversationalists group is 56% female, exceeding the concentration of females in any of the other groups. This finding correlates with other studies that show more women are actively using Twitter than men. In fact, Quantcast estimates 53% of Twitter visitors are female.
• Three years ago, Inactives (online consumers who did not participate in any social media activities) made up 52% of total internet users. Today, that number has shrunk to 17%, while all other segments of behavior have increased. From this, we can assume that social media usage is becoming ubiquitous.

Comparison between Social Technographics Profiles in 2006 and 2009

What do these insights mean for marketers?

Forrester’s Social Technographics is just one of many tools to help marketers understand how consumers are behaving in the social media sphere. In developing social media strategy, it’s crucial to first examine and listen to the target audience before moving forward.

Knowing that Conversationalists have a higher composition of women than the other Technographic segments can help inform the strategies of the multitude of brands that target women. Campaigns surrounding Twitter updates and Facebook posts should be placed into consideration.

The addition of Conversationalists to Social Technographics, more than anything, is an indication of how social media behavior continues to change and showcases the growth of social as more people move from being Inactives into other parts of the ladder. In 2006, it wasn’t necessary to create a segment to describe people who simply post updates on their lives, especially in microblogging environments like Twitter. Now it has become a common activity where 1 in 3 online adults update their connections with bite-size pieces of information or content at least once a week. The lesson to be learned is to never rely heavily on a single platform or technology for social media, but to always be aware of the changing trends and behaviors of consumers.

If you’re interested in taking a look at the Social Technographics data of few different audience bases, try the Forrester Social Technographics tool here: (Note – the addition of Conversationalists has not been added to this free widget)

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-Christine Hsu, Social Marketing Strategist at 360i

Industry vet and popular Web Strategy blogger Jeremiah Owyang announced his departure from Forrester Research last week – and he has now confirmed he’ll be joining fellow former Forrester alum Charlene Li at Altimeter Group, a firm that provides strategic advice on how companies can tap into emerging technologies to address pressing business issues.

In light of the news, we’ve asked Jeremiah a few questions about his next move.

[360i]: Why make this move now?

[Jeremiah Owyang]: Being an industry analyst provided a unique opportunity to assess the direction of the market. It’s clear to me where the direction the industry is headed – companies need an on-boarding process for any new technology that’s coming –not just social.

[360i]: How do you anticipate working with agencies?

[JO]: What makes Altimeter different is that we want to work with a variety of implementers – agency, technology and thought leaders – to assemble the right team for companies. Currently, Altimeter is already working with agencies; in fact two clients are agencies and benefit from market visibility, education and introducing her to the right folks in the space. One of the great opportunities for agencies to work with us is that we can introduce them to a wider array of folks they may not have already known.

[360i]: How will this affect your blogging?

[JO]: I love blogging, it’s a great way for me to share – and learn from commenters. I’m going to have more time to focus on blogging, and plan to explore how social evolves to the real world with location aware social networks and devices.

***

We at 360i are always appreciative of the insights Jeremiah brings to our industry. That’s why we asked him to contribute to our Social Marketing Playbook, which he graciously did. An excerpt of his guest column – “The Social Contract: Today vs. Tomorrow” – follows below:

With the advent of portable IDs has come a unique challenge and opportunity for brand marketers. Technology will shift the power from brands to people as they are able to control their own identity. As a result, the Social Contract between people and brands will evolve.

Registration pages will go extinct and people can choose to expose as much or as little information as they want. People – not brands – will be in control. In order to gain control back, marketers will need to reinvent the digital Social Contract as we know it.

Today, the Social Contract puts brands in control. Prospects who want more information about a product, access to a whitepaper, attend an event, or get product support will often have to register on a Web site. As a result, they give information, and thus grant power to brands.

Tomorrow, the Social Contract puts customers in charge. Customers will elect how much information they want to share. Prospects can share minimal amounts of information, giving the brand limited ability to contact them. As the prospect becomes more interested, they may choose to offer more information in exchange for additional value.

You can read the rest of Jeremiah’s column – and a ton of other great insights – in our Social Marketing Playbook (PDF).

The self-service ad model may not be the secret to Facebook’s future fortunes, but it presents marketers with some largely untapped opportunities for reaching the most precisely targeted audiences online.

If you talk to Facebook’s users about advertising, you’ll hear a number of criticisms. Some say it’s brash or irrelevant. Many others don’t notice it at all. I’d expect many consumers wouldn’t even think of the best ads as advertising, such as those ads for TV show or movie premieres on the homepage where you RSVP if you’re going. Some of the worst problems with the site’s advertising have been minimized, such as those in my musings last summer on Facebook’s ‘Jewhavioral’ targeting and overly personal weight loss ads.

Forrester’s Marketing Forum last month provided me with an excuse to run another ad trial, as I demoed the platform to an attendee during a break and wound up creating a live campaign. I was covering the event as a blogger (read the roundup), so I had something to offer. Here are a few things I learned in the process. You can view screen shots from the campaign on Flickr or SlideShare.

Facebook self-service ads remain as easy as ever to create. While I can’t say my ad copy was perfectly written, putting up something passable took all of a few minutes. There have been few changes since the service launched.

1) The targeting options such as Keywords and Workplaces allow precise ways to reach consumers volunteering this information. I had the campaign target people working at Forrester Research, which brought up about 400 people in the United States. Most advertisers won’t want to cast such narrow nets, but the option’s there.Creating similar ads is also a cinch. I used this feature to create five versions, all of which are shown on Flickr and SlideShare. These include ads targeting Forrester’s competitors, and one targeting Forrester employees in the Netherlands.

2) Expect low CPMs. Recommended bids ranged from 30 cents to 46 cents. I set my bids significantly higher since I was targeting fewer than 1,500 people through the various versions of the ads. I tried entering various other keywords and targeting options and couldn’t find anything higher than 50 cents. More precise targeting does not lead to higher recommended bids.

3) The actual CPM after a week was 60 cents across the campaign. If Facebook is able to reach its $5 billion valuation, it’s not coming from advertisers like me.

4) The performance was underwhelming, with a 0.25% click-through rate. That could be the fault of the ads. One ad targeted to Forrester employees where I used a better image reached a 0.60% CTR. I also know at least one of the clicks came from the analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who was featured in that ad. Moral: people will click ads with their own picture in it. But do that too much and you’re probably going to creep out everyone who sees it. Fortunately that targeting’s not offered by Facebook directly, though some application ad networks can pull in profile pictures.

After going through the process as an advertiser, I’m reminded of how relevant the advertising can be for consumers. Advertisers know a lot about me from the site, and they can infer a lot more. Fans of “30 Rock,” Christopher Guest movies and Jonathan Safran Foer books living in New York probably would welcome hearing about restaurants in the city’s theater district. The cost of testing these ads is negligible; for around $15, I amassed over 25,000 impressions, which is plenty of information should I choose to use it for another campaign.

Self-service ads won’t be the best option for running a major branding campaign on Facebook. The engagement ads on the homepage serve that purpose. With this kind of targeting, though, I’ll fork over that quarter per click when there’s a reason to reach a segment of Facebook’s audience.

This article was originally published on MediaPost’s Social Media Insider blog.

Forrester’s report cites brands that put down the megaphone and sparked dialogue with their audience (Image via ABC).

Forrester’s Sean Corcoran recently authored an article for interactive marketing professionals called “Using Social Applications in Ad Campaigns: How Marketers Can Move from Broadcast to Dialogue.” 360i and client H&R Block were cited in the report as an example for how marketers can use campaigns to build long-term channels.

Here’s an excerpt from Forrester:

“H&R Block, working with the agency 360i, … developed programs within MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to help support people during the tax season. While these programs were created for short-term use, H&R Block continues to use them as long-term platforms to provide tax support for their followers.”*

You can view 360i’s H&R Block case study here.

The report also includes a description of the National Geographic Channel’s successful Twitter campaign promoting Air Force One. 360i’s Emerging Media team played a key role in this project, launching the Twitter account and ultimately passing the baton back to National Geographic Channel.

“The Twitter account gained more than 2,000 followers in less than three weeks. A week before the show aired, National Geographic tweeted that it was transitioning the account from Air Force One to National Geographic. Result: 300 additional followers joined in the next week, an expanded group that National Geographic can tap into for further program promotion.”*

You can purchase the full report on Forrester’s Web site.

*“Using Social Applications in Ad Campaigns,” Forrester Research, Inc., April 29, 2009

Forrester’s Marketing Forum offered a bunch of thought-provoking subjects we’ll probably be chewing on for awhile. One that should spark more conversation is the Starbucks and Blast Radius presentation on the (STARBUCKS) RED holiday campaign that melded the complementary hobbies of caffeination and philanthropy.

The presentation referenced how Starbucks considered paid media (search engine marketing, display media, offline media buys, etc) and earned media (blog posts, comments, video uploads – exposures that aren’t bought directly) (see our coverage of Fred Wilson’s Ad Age presentation on earned media earlier this month). There was a third bucket included here: owned media – all of the assets that the marketer owns that can be used in a campaign, from websites to brick and mortar locations. (Here’s coverage of the presentation.)

Is this breakout needed? Should it be included with ‘earned’ and ‘paid’ in marketing plans?

Probably. Owned media comes up earlier and later in the process. You can’t plan a campaign unless you know what your owned media assets are, and the better you make use of owned media, that’s one more major factor working in your favor.

Most of the time, owned media is also where the campaign experience is fulfilled. It’s where you’re driving people to, so it has to be optimized for that conversion. That can mean optimizing the website to create the most meaningful experience, or in the case of Starbucks, creating signage and coffee cups in stores to fuel new and repeat purchases.

Owned media isn’t anything new, of course. It runs the risk of adding more jargon to the lexicon, to the point where it can be easily dismissed as more marketingspeak. But it is an important part of the equation to remember, and whether you lump that in with asset management or owned media or your Venn diagram of choice, it should come up somewhere along the way.

Forrester Principal Analyst Shar VanBoskirk set the stage with an energetic presentation about risk taking. I had talked with Shar about this last month, when she asked some bloggers for feedback on her idea for the keynote, and surprisingly the feedback I gave (which she kindly credited) inspired a lot of her discussion.

She was thinking a lot about risk taking, and she shared my initial feedback on the Forrester blog last month:

…Leveraging interactive tools can actually make marketing innovation *less* risky. Berkowitz mentioned – and I agree – that doing things like monitoring Twitter for what is being said about your brand or campaigns is actually an extremely *safe* thing to do. Although Twitter sounds all newfangled for a traditional brand, it provides a way to listen to how your audience is talking about your brand. Heeding this input can help marketers actually be better/more secure in crafting customer-centric marketing programs.

This wound up leading to a very detailed discussion at the Marketing Forum on managing risk – how to take risks and how to make them less risky. She focused specifically on “accessible innovation”, which she defined as “A marketing program development that you can pursue from within your own role in order to solve problems or improve business results.”

Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk suggests marketers leverage interactive tools to manage risk online.

Here are the Four Fundamentals of Accessible Innovation:

- Enhance: build on existing idea to create new value, to create margin on existing programs

- Include: incorporate many disparate perspectives, gain community input on campaign devleopment – eg Adidas including users in New School of Thought campaign

- Empathize: relate to community and bring value, to build personal relationship between brand and customers – eg Zappos as human face of Twitter brand, company had $1B in sales in 2008, 75% growth

- Iterate: segment different messages to different audiences – Shockwave used different websites, got 150% increase in annual subscriptions

At our agency, we know it’s not all about risks. There are very safe bets like search engine marketing (safe and tested for most marketers, at least), and there are some things that feel risky, like communicating directly with customers through public channels. But by listening to what consumers are saying, the risk drops off dramatically, and marketers can make better informed bets that are more likely to deliver results.

Forrester Research published a report discussing the value in paying bloggers to talk about your brand. According to the story, the time to use “sponsored conversations” is when the brand can’t interest bloggers without additional incentive. Marketers considering this approach may want to ask themselves: Would the blogger inherently write about it editorially because it provides value to the readership? If you can’t get your product on the radar with bloggers, it might be worthwhile to rethink your product strategy and pitch when approaching the blogger. Why should they discuss your brand and product? What would be of interest to their readers?

For marketers, paying bloggers can create trust issues with blogs’ readers. Because it is often left up to the blogger to decide how (or if) to disclose payment, marketers can end up bearing the brunt of a bloggers violation of their readers’ trust. As marketers, we need to be as absolutely transparent to consumers as possible, whether directly or through a blogger. How else can we earn trust?

In the interest of full disclosure, 360i employs a team of experienced digital publicists that develops relationships with bloggers and other online influentials on behalf of our clients to provide them with valuable editorial material and digital assets to provide to their readers. No money is ever exchanged. We provide valuable information and assets (videos, photos, etc) to bloggers and if they find it valuable, they share it, and likely advocate for it, to their readers. And yes, 360i is paying me as an employee of the agency to post this.

For the report, Forrester evaluated seven vendors against 72 criteria, using a combination of data sources for its assessment, including vendor surveys, scenario-based demos, client interviews and careful review of client results. Participating vendors were limited to agencies offering a balance of paid search and SEO offerings and focused on delivering solutions to enterprise clients with over $1 billion in revenues.