Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - November 29th, 2011

Hi all, I hope you're all well! It's an exciting week for us - we've begun to scale up the amount of useful analysis and insight we put out, and our first story - an investigation into Google+ -...

Hi all,

I hope you're all well! It's an exciting week for us - we've begun to scale up the amount of useful analysis and insight we put out, and our first story - an investigation into Google+ - has just been published. All this and more is below:

Is Google+ a Facebook killer?

In this piece, Martyn Wilson investigates the unique benefits (and risks) of G+ over Facebook. Martyn interviewed a variety of social media practitioners for their take on the new network. The key findings were:

1. There is new functionality (Circles, Hangouts) that G+ has over Facebook - once companies start using these tools, the network will boom
2. Adoption has already started (61 of the world's top 100 brands have a page), and you should get your brand page now
3. G+ has a secret weapon - Google Search. As the two get integrated, companies won't be able to ignore the new social network

7 key tweets from #csmeu

We've just wrapped up (literally just - it finished an hour ago) our second annual European Corporate Social Media Summit. Nick has written up a quick summary of seven key lessons he picked up from the conference. It features contributions from Whole Foods, LEGO, 3M, Microsoft and more. You can see the 7 tweets - and some analysis/context on each here - but a quick sample:

• People don't expect you to come back on a personal level, but you should
• Move the social media mindset from campaigns to long term engagement
• It's not the big that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow

How does the US social consumer differ from the UK version?

The guys at We Are Social posted an infographic on their blog earlier today focusing on the difference between the UK and the US 'social consumer'. You can see the infographic here. A few highlights:

1. 40% of UK consumers have interacted with a brand on Facebook, compared to 53% in the USA
2. However, 43% of consumers purchased after 'online interaction', vs 31% in the USA
3. The UK's 'high sharers' are 3 x more likely to recommend a product on social media

Fish where the fish are: how niche social networks can work for your brand

Mashable published a post yesterday focusing on niche social networks - and what they offer to your brand. They cover three niche networks, and give some tips on how you can utilise networks like these for your company.

A few highlights:

1. Niche networks offer highly targeted (and often deeper) engagement
2. ModCloth, an online retailer of vintage clothes, partnered with Instagram because there seemed to be a lot of similarities between the two brands and their consumers
3. Pincloth, another niche site used by ModCloth, is now one of the company's top unpaid referral sites in terms of traffic and revenue
4. Foodspotting, a niche food photography network, helped CMC, an apartment company in Florida, to "help CMC connect with local businesses and residents...while also providing a 'value add' to existing residents"

An interview with the EVP of consumer marketing from VH1

AllFacebook have just released an interview with the Executive Vice-President of Consumer Marketing from VH1, Niel Cox-Hagan. You can see the full interview here but here are my key selected quotes:

• "The first part of our strategy was just to be on Facebook and have a strong presence"
• "A challenge specifical to VH1 is how many franchises we have and how they differ from one another. We must cater to different genres and meet each franchise's specific interests and unique attributes"
• "Being educated in social media is now a necessity for all aspects of marketing"
• "As far as what we directly spend on Facebook, somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000 over the course of a year"