Marketers: Go after iPad users, not Twitter and Facebook

IBM released their 2012 Black Friday online shopping results.  There are a few notable findings from the reports.  I wanted to highlight two points:

- The iPad Factor: The iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smart phone, reaching nearly 10 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and Android 5.5 percent. The iPad dominated tablet traffic at 88.3 percent followed by the Barnes and Noble Nook at 3.1 percent, Amazon Kindle at 2.4 percent and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8 percent.

- Social Sales: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube generated .34 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, a decrease of more than 35 percent from 2011.

Facebook to marketers: We'll show your ROI

Q: Which one of the following is not a communication tool?

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Skype
4. Google Search

Answer is obvious.  Anyone who used the tools would identify Google Search.  And that has been the biggest challenge that Facebook has been dealing with.  Most users think of Facebook as communication tool, much like email and instant messaging.  Facebook users visit facebook.com to stay in touch with friends and keep up with what their friends are up to.

Hence advertising on Facebook did not work as well as Google Search.  People are looking for something when they visit google.com.  It's the perfect opportunity to pitch related products that might solve the people's problem.

Ideas are cheap. Here are a few for Facebook.

Facebook made a blog post about joint study with Datalogix showing that clicks don't really matter when it comes to Facebook ads.  What matters more instead, Brad Smallwood says, is number of times it's shown to unique users at optimal interval.

Facebook Director of Pricing and Measurement, Brad Smallwood, basically says
to trust Facebook and Datalogix because they know how ad works on Facebook.
Don't know you, but it doesn't sound like a winning strategy...
Source: http://7.mshcdn.com/

Here is the Facebook's problem.  Marketers are comparing Facebook ads with Google Adwords.  Although Facebook ads are in different category all together, marketers are used to dealing with and understands Google Adwords model.  The key difference between ads from two sites come from what users are looking for when they visit the sites.

Users come to Google to look for something, whereas users come to Facebook to catch up with their friends.  Many more users are open to discovering new things when they visit Google than Facebook.  As Susan Lyne summed it up, 'selling things on Facebook is like selling things in a bar.'

So here are some cheap ideas to solve this problem:

Marketers are still unsure of Facebook

One quote caught my eyes the most when I scanned through my Twitter Timeline.

Selling things on Facebook is like selling things in a bar.

It was a statement by Gilt Chairman Susan Lyne.  Gilt was one of the early adopters to set up Facebook store, but the store was a flop.  It turned out that there were other marketers sharing similar sentiments about Facebook as advertisement platform.  Check out more damning quotes from this BusinessInsider article.

Facebook users are logging on to connect with friends, family and people around them.  But when it comes to discovering a new product or finding a good deal on products, Facebook users are not responding to them the same way as Google ads.

Salesforce's big bet: Marketing will be social

Salesforce has acquired Radian 6 last year.  Earlier this year, Salesforce added Buddy Media.  Salesforce has been making investments on social media for a while.  They are now combining these with Chatter and making a big bet on marketing.  Led by social media explosion, Salesforce is betting that CMOs will look for  SaaS marketing tool.



It's not just Salesforce jumping in to provide marketing solution.  Oracle, Adobe, and Google are all putting their own pieces together to enhance their marketing tools to become social.  All of these companies have made investments on social media recently, and they are seeing the same trend.  More and more marketing teams are looking to invest on social media marketing, and driving product selection decisions.

Social Media Spend as a Percent of Marketing Budget
Source: CMOSurvey.org

Combining the emergence of social marketing tool with explosion of data from ubiquitous mobile devices, it's easy to see how big data analytics will be the next important piece to cloud marketing tool offering.

Social marketing: it's about building a relationship

"All this massive information is going to be filtered through your friends... the era of push marketing is over, or it's ending."- Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook

Paul Adams took the stage at Federated Media Publishing Signal San Francisco earlier today.  He talked about how marketers often misunderstand how social media marketing campaigns should be designed.  As he wrote in his recently published book Grouped, he emphasized that social media campaign is about building a relationship with customers, not flashing a sales sign in front of as many of your target audience as you can possibly afford.  Bigger and flashier is not what social marketing is about.  It's about building an emotional connection with customers and their friends.