With all due respect to Ad Age and Edelman, I feel the analysis of the Edelman Trust Barometer 2010 maybe a little misleading. The headline "In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less" obviously implies that people are trusting their friends less when making decisions. While that makes great copy, when you click on the chart what you really see is that trust in all forms of media (the alternatives were TV News, Radio News, Newspapers and Friends/Peers) has dropped dramatically by approximately the same percentages. Trust in Friends/Peers hasn't dropped considerably more versus those other categories.As we debate (again and again) the value of influence from friends and peers, lets keep two extremely important factors in mind.
- The subject being discussed makes a big difference. For example, I'm not going to trust my friends very much when I'm deciding whether to get open heart surgery. However, if I'm buying running shoes (as I did yesterday), advice from my friends will make all the difference. I'll of course be asking the friends who are runners for advice and not the ones who don't.
- And secondly, lets not confuse trust in companies with trust in products and services. They are two separate categories (with of course connections to one another). This research was about trust in companies versus trust in products. As we talk about friending and trusting peers, it matters most with products that people have experienced and less so with the companies behind them.
This is the paragraph that I'm struggling with the most -
If consumers stop believing what their friends and the "average Joes" appearing in testimonials say about a product or company, the implications could be significant not just for marketers but for the social networks and word-of-mouth platforms selling themselves as solutions to communicating in a jaded world. The influence of peers has been considered the leading rationale for brands' shifting marketing dollars to social media.
If the coverage focused just on information about the company, then that would be fine. But generalizing to products doesn't seem fair.
Disclaimers - I work for Razorfish and my company research shows that trust in peer recommendations around purchasing decisions is not dropping but rising. My analysis is also based on reading the Ad Age piece and the Edelman executive summary only. I do not have access to the whole research report
For a long time I believed that Facebook was moving too slowly in addressing the needs of marketers. The pages for brands was but a rudimentary step in the right direction and the analytics behind the pages were simplistic at best. I'm excited to see that it is changing now and I believe that marketers are going to flock to Facebook (and with their dollars) and not just because of the huge user base but increasingly because of the specific advertising products and analytics that the platform is offering. In a sense Facebook is truly entering the marketing world now.
One small example, of this is how they're testing the ability to show case impressions and clicks. This is hugely valuable for both marketers and individuals alike. Big brand and personal brands (meaning you as an individual) care about this and I believe it'll spur even greater use of the Facebook fan pages and the newsfeed. What is especially interesting is if this information is made completely transparent as the image above seems to imply. The next step to telling you the number of impressions and clicks that a post has gotten is to tell you the number of people that have purchased the product. As e-commerce rolls out across the Facebook landscape, I can see that being a metric included as well. And knowing the number of people who have purchased a product (as a percentage of impressions and clicks about it), will be a huge influencer for purchases. Photograph and inspiration for this post is courtesy Loic Le Meur.
I was invited to keynote the Digital Book World Conference this week. Held in New York this conference was for book publishers large and small who are navigating the digital space.
I focused on social media and how social influence marketing is forcing these publishers is to rethink their value chain and their position as B2B companies. My hypothesis - they need to become B2C players as well.
Let me know what you think. The book publishing space is undergoing a sea changing (similar to the newspaper industry) and I feel my recommendations may help.
Here's my keynote presentation from the SeesmicLook product launch. I was invited to give the keynote at this launch event which had Microsoft and Advertising Age as its launch partners.
Social Influence Marketing Trends
The presentation got some coverage on Twitter and also on a few blogs including CenterNetworks (The Best Social Media Definition To-Date) and TechStartups (Shiv Singh Knocked It Out of the Park). Thank you for all the feedback both positive and negative (Apparently, I ended the presentation rather abruptly. Good to keep in mind for next time)
View more presentations from shivsingh.
I've got a few extra copies of my book Social Media Marketing for Dummies. Rather than give them to clients or friends, I've decided to give them away to you - but there's one condition. You have to donate the exact amount that the book costs ($16.49) to the Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund. Send me your receipt and I'll send you a copy of the book. I can do this for the first five people to send me their receipts electronically. My email address is shivsingh at gmail.com. And if you've already donated, retweet this message and I'll enter you into a drawing for a free copy of the book. Photograph credit - The New York Times.
I was obviously barking up the wrong tree with social influence marketing. The future of marketing is all about Donut Marketing! More seriously speaking, there is no question that when crafting a web strategy you need to look at every dynamic online holistically - what's happening on your own website, off of it, with your owned, earned and paid media initiatives all harmoniously.
But what's often ignored is that you need to look at your audiences and customers holistically too - where are they, how many of them are viewing your ads, visiting your website, influencing each other and getting influenced and on what platforms. Strangely, that dimension is often left out of the equation. 
And I'd also argue that the age of the corporate website being the cornerstone "temple" of any digital strategy is passing. The website is simply not going to matter as much in the future unless of course the corporation evolves into a media company too - something that every company and every brand may need to. Don't ask me what this means for all the traditional publishers out there. Image courtesy Elliance Inc.
Yesterday Erik Qualman of Socialnomics fame included me in a ClickZ list of Social Media All-Stars. I joined Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Solis, Mari Smith, Clay Shirky, Peter Shankman, David Meerman Scott, Jeremiah Owyang, Lee Odden and Dave Morin on the American League team. Thank you for including me in this great list. I'm also glad to be on the American League team considering that I'm a Red Sox fan. The National League would have been strange! Now of course there's no perfect list and there are other folks who could have just as easily made the list as me, but what I like about the people included is that they're all giving a lot back to the community and are furthering the discourse.
I love this print by Utagawa Hiroshige updated for our times and our social media context. Not surprisingly,of all those comments and tweets I can't help but wonder which have a higher influence score than others. Also, what about the wave that came before this one and the one that will follow next. And metaphorically speaking, does the boat represent a brand in today's world? Okay, maybe I'm over analyzing this one! Special thanks to Mickey Slater for pointing me to this.
Authors learn the most from book reviews even though they may make them nervous.The best ones serve as guide posts for the next book (or the next edition) and bring into focus what's working in the book and what may not be. Since my book was published at the tail end of October several reviews have been published (and more continue to). With each one, I learn something new that helps. Thank you to all those who are writing the reviews - they're not only helpful to your readers as the determine whether the book is worth buying but also to me, the author.
Here's a recent review from Deirdre Breakenridge who's also the co-author of "Putting the Public back into PR." I like because she mixes praise with honest feedback of where her opinion differs. Extremely helpful for me and hopefully for her readers as well. In fact, based on her review I'm mulling writing a post about the role of PR in social media. There are lots of different views on the subject needless to say! Here's an except of the review:
There are many reasons why I like Social Media Marketing For Dummies: The book never strays from teaching readers the best approach to Social Media Marketing or Social Influence Marketing (which are used interchangeably by the author).
Social Media Marketing for Dummies provides a broad overview but also digs into details. For example, one of my favorite parts of the book is Chapter 3, "Getting in the Social Influence Marketing Frame of Mind." This chapter breaks down the Social Media Marketing Funnel or the stages a consumer goes through during the purchasing process (Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action and Loyalty) and how you can use social media marketing in each one of the stages to enhance the process.
Singh gives helpful hints or a "Tip" identified with a bulls eye icon and "Warning" messages, which are easily recognized with a bomb icon. These icons appear in every chapter. For example, with respect to establishing a social influence marketing voice (SIM Voice) in Chapter 5, he says as a Tip, "Sometimes the best way to discover whether you need a SIM voice is by scanning the conversations about your brand across the social web." And, he points out as a bomb icon Warning in the same chapter, "If you do offer discounts and special promotions, you must be prepared to redeem them."
Visit Deirdre's website to read the full book review. Also, check out her book "Putting the Public back in PR" It was a great read.
OMMA Magazine discusses Social Influence Marketing and my new book in its latest issue. Here's an extract.
"Conversations about brands, products and services are increasingly woven into the interactions of social networks as a means to connect with others, and these conversations have great influence even though people aren't consciously asking about brand opinions," writes Singh.
"Furthermore, consumers do not always realize how much influencing they are doing, and how much they are being influenced, when they have conversations about brands across social platforms."
Social influence marketing is a subtle thing. It should be done with an especially light touch since it has become so influential. eMarketer found that for 18 to 34-year-olds, social media has become the second-most important marketing form, behind only recommendations from friends and family.
You can read the whole piece over at OMMA Magazine. Am I overselling Social Influence Marketing? I believe 2010 is going to be even bigger in the SIM world. Interestingly, 9 out of the 10 most successful ads in 2009 included consumer participation. One could argue its already larger than we could have imagined a few years ago.
This is another great comparison and too good to pass up. It comes to me via Gerald out of our Frankfurt office. Consider buying the book, Slightware from which this comes. I haven't seen it but based off of this visual, it seems it maybe a good one.
digiday:DAILY reviewed Social Media Marketing for Dummies. Here's the book review. They titled the post, "Shiv Singh Ain't No Dummy" which was a hilarious title. I'm told that the piece got much higher click thru rate than expected because of that title. Is it because everyone wasn't sure that I'm not a dummy and wanted to see the proof points? Who knows! Here's an excerpt.
Nothing breaks a topic down like the "For Dummies" series. All in it has sold more than 150 million books educating the world on the most basic elements of everything from The Internet to eBay to wine to divorce. It would stand to reason that the most recent in the series "Social Media Marketing For Dummies" holds no challenges for today's sophisticated marketer. But sophisticated the book is. It dispenses quickly with the basics of "social influence marketing" and immediately moves on to the most challenging issues on social media such as mobile, authenticity finding a social voice for your company, and even how to energize and manage a social media effort internally.The reason for the book's depth comes directly from its author. As the VP & Global Social Media Lead with Razorfish he has been on the social media beat for big clients, small clients, and marketers that need research to plan and measure the newest platform. Rather than tell his audience of marketers what they already know, Singh took the opportunity to write a book for "dummies" to set out a complete vision of how social media can be executed. It just went into its second printing last week, and we caught up with Singh on that occasion.
You can read the full book review over at digiday:Daily.
Like many others, I was a huge fan of Tiger Woods until recently. He epitomized perfection on and off the golf course. Something that has been shattered in the last few weeks. We all know that. A question that remains though - how is he trying to contain his damage and is he using social media helping or hurting him? (Also, read the MediaPost story that I was interviewed for)In a nutshell, the answer is no. He has over 1.3 million fans on his Facebook fan page and has locked them out (no one can comment). Woods hasn't posted to the fan page since November 6th himself. Instead he's made press statements via his own website. Here's a secret - the media will always be harsher on you than your fans. The fans are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt (though here there doesn't seem to be much doubt). Don't ignore them - instead reach them directly.
Here's what I said Tiger Woods should do in the MediaPost story - use the website to talk to the press, speak directly to the fans through the Facebook page, open it up for comments even if it means getting slammed and be clear about how much you will respond. Don't delete anything published earlier (yes, that includes those family photographs) and tell us about your path to recovery as it progresses. Mr. Woods you owe that much to your fans including me.
This just isn't about trying to hold onto your brand for dear life, it is also about what you owe your fans. You betrayed them. Also read David Deal's perspective for another point of view.
Who'd have thought. Can't seem to access Twitter from my iPhone either. I wonder how long it will be down for. The social web comes to a standstill.
