Same post as yesterday, just testing out the twitter feed feature. I apologize. Anyway, here’s the link to the white paper / case study Web Case Study
The official version of a web satisfaction case study, based on a project that I worked on a while ago, has now been published. It’s interesting how hours and hours of work can be compressed into a couple of pages. The customer satisfaction results, are very encouraging, but web site improvement is not a one time event, and there need to be a relentless effort in continuous tweaking, and improvement, based on the Voice of the Customer. For B-2-B technology web sites this can be particularly challenging. Enjoy Web_CaseStudy .
Normally I try generate unique content, and not reiterate what others are doing, but today I participated in a MarketingProfs seminar regarding the “State of Social Media”, and this is well worth a brief comment. This research is an in depth view and benchmark into more 3000 companies (both B-2-B and B-2-C), and how they use social media, how they measure it and what their success so far has been. There’s a few surprising findings / recommendations.
1) There’s hardly any difference at all between the usage in B-2-B and B-2-C. Same tools are used trying to achieve the same things. You would think B-2-C would be much further ahead, but no. They are exactly in the same place with approximately success rate for what they’re trying to do. Except of course that their participating audiences are larger.
2) The objectives around Social Media are pretty fundamental – driving traffic to the web site, generate awareness and look for negative PR comments. Again you would think B-2-C would have more creative goals.
3) Although Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the big ones, there’s a large number of smaller “industry specific” applications, so practitioners really need to know what their customers are using on a micro level. Twitter might not be it, although everyone is talking about it . You need to find out what the “work persona” is using.
4) Of the people that are using Social Media, only an average of 35% say that the efforts are successful meeting expectations. Pretty bad, compared to more traditional e-marketing activities like email marketing, or maybe the expectations are too low for email.
5) The average number of Twitter followers for companies are greatly skewed due to a few high hitters. The norm is about 150. So if your company have 150 followers you’re doing OK.
6) Only 12% of companies have strict and clearly articulated Social Media policies, and > 60% of marketers practicing Social Media do it “on their own time” (not being paid for it or part of their objectives)