BtoB Technology Marketers Missing Social Media Opportunities

February 25th, 2009

77 percent of business technology decision-makers engage with social media on the job, yet most B2B marketers are not effectively using social technologies to influence the purchasing decisions of their customers, says Forrester Research.

In 2007 Forreter released their comsumer Social Technographics Scale . (See more explanation about the scale in the Forrester PowerPoint )

Now they’ve done the same for BtoB buyers. Forrester polled more than 1,200 business technology decision-makers in North America and Europe about their social media participation throughout the buying cycle. The numbers are quite different - and I’d guess that the rapid adoption of social media over the past two years is one factor.

The Social Technographics Profile segments business buyers into six categories based on their social activities:

• Creators — 27 percent publish a blog, publish Web pages, create/upload video or music, or write articles and post them online.
• Critics — 37 percent post reviews of products or services, comment on someone else’s blog, or contribute to online forums.
• Collectors — 29 percent use RSS feeds, vote for Web sites online, or add tags to Web pages or photos.
• Joiners — 29 percent maintain a profile on a social networking site or visit social networking sites.
• Spectators — 69 percent read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video from other users, or read online forums and reviews.
• Inactives — 23 percent do not participate in any social media activities for work purposes.
  

91% of these decision-makers consume social media including blogs, video, and customer reviews.


What’s the biggest influencer? 75 percent said peers influence their purchase decisions more than any other media or information source.

“Emerging social behaviors will fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers — especially in a down economy,” said Oliver Young, senior analyst at Forrester. “B2B marketers must use social profiling data to determine how social tactics complement the rest of the marketing mix. Integrating traditional and online tactics is essential as the groundswell of social activity grows.”

The new report, “The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers,” directed at Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals, is available to Forrester RoleView™ clients and can also be purchased directly from the Forrester website

Pew Internet Releases 2009 Generations Online Report

Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online.

Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people).

The web continues to be populated largely by younger generations, as over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project surveys taken from 2006-2008.

Teens and Generation Y (internet users age 18-32) are the most likely groups to use the internet for entertainment and for communicating with friends and family. These younger generations are significantly more likely than their older counterparts to seek entertainment through online videos, online games, and virtual worlds, and they are also more likely to download music to listen to later. Internet users ages 12-32 are more likely than older users to read other people's blogs and to write their own; they are also considerably more likely than older generations to use social networking sites and to create profiles on those sites.

Compared with teens and Generation Y, older generations use the internet less for socializing and entertainment and more as a tool for information searches, emailing, and buying products.

In particular, older internet users are significantly more likely than younger generations to look online for health information. Health questions drive internet users age 73 and older to the internet just as frequently as they drive Generation Y users, outpacing teens by a significant margin. Researching health information is the third most popular online activity with the most senior age group, after email and online search.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/report_display.asp

About the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

Pew Internet explores the impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life.

Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The project's Web site: http://www.pewinternet.org <https://webmail.pewresearch.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.pewinte
rnet.org>

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

Keep Up if You Can: Teens Are Taking Cellular Use to New Levels

Today's teens live in a world saturated by technology - and they embrace it with open arms. This is just one of the many findings from A Generation Unplugged - presented by Harris Interactive at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Conference in September 2008.

Amazingly, teens know more about cell phone models and wireless plans than their favorite band or sports team.

In this issue of Trends & Tudes, we examine findings from this study, which reveals the role cell phones play in teens' social lives, transforming communication for this age segment.

Source: HarrisInteractive

Internet Overtakes Newspapers As News Outlet

Internet Overtakes Newspapers As News Outlet
The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news.

Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

Top News Stories of 2008
While the 2008 presidential campaign attracted high levels of public attention, the economy was the top story of the year in terms of news interest, according to Pew's Weekly News Interest Index. In late September, as the nation's financial crisis deepened, 70% said they were following news about the economy very closely. That ranks among the highest levels of news interest for any story in the past two decades.

News about gas prices, both rising and falling, also attracted considerable public attention. In early June, two-thirds of Americans (66%) said they were tracking news about the rising price of gasoline very closely.

The rising price of gasoline was the top news story in 2007, but far fewer followed news about rising gas prices very closely (52% in May). This year, the falling price of gas also drew broad interest (53% very closely in October).

To read the rest of this artilce, click here: http://people-press.org/report/479/internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-source

Pew Internet Releases Adults and Social Networks report

Today, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project releases a new data memo titled Adults and Social Network Websites that looks at how adults use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Among the main findings of the report:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.

Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.

Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.

When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/272/report_display.asp

About the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit "fact tank"
that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet explores the impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The project's Web site:
http://www.pewinternet.org

New Pew Internet Report: The Future of the Internet III

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Here are the key findings in a new report based on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

* The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
* The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
* Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
* Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing "arms race," with the "crackers" who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
* The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
* "Next-generation" engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp

The Changing Face of the Press Release

According to the Executive Summary of a study conducted by Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research and made possible by Vocus, the advent of new online communication channels, the goals, target audiences, and overall scope of press releases have transformed press releases themselves into a new communication tool used by public relations and marketing professionals alike.

The respondents' top goals for online press releases indicated that the traditional goals of increasing an organization's visibility and credibility and announcing news are now almost equally as important as new goals that include reaching customers directly, creating online content, and search engine optimization (SEO).

While PR professionals placed more importance on traditional goals such as announcing news and enhancing thought leadership, marketing professionals reported SEO and reaching consumers as important goals for their online press releases. Small business owners were concerned with using the release as a sales tool and reaching customers directly.

Both traditional media and new media emerged as the top two most important audiences respondents hoped to reach with their online press releases. Bloggers and new media followed traditional media in importance, but were a very close second, separated by only 0.28 points on a 1-5 scale.

In terms of target audiences for online press releases, significant differences emerged between marketing and public relations professionals. Although both marketing and public relations professionals reported more than average importance for reaching traditional media, consumers, and webmasters that will repurpose the release, PR professionals were consistently more interested than marketing professionals in reaching traditional media.

Marketing professionals were consistently more interested than PR practitioners in reaching new media or consumers directly. For example:

• PR professionals rated the importance of reaching traditional media an average 4.53 on a 1-5 scale, which is significantly higher than marketing professionals' rating of 3.82
  Similarly, marketing professionals rated the importance of reaching webmasters with an average 3.49 on a 1-5 scale, which is significantly higher than PR practitioners' rating of only 2.83
  
• These results indicate that online press releases have been adopted as a communications tool by the marketing profession, says the report, but are being used very differently than they have traditionally been used by public relations professionals.
  

The most frequently mentioned criterion for evaluating the success of online press releases was:

• The number of times the release has been republished on websites (79.6 percent)
  
• The number of times the release has been viewed online (76.8 percent)
  
• An article based on the release (75.4 percent)
  
• Media interview requests as a result of the release (74.2 percent)
  

Interestingly, although marketing and public relations professionals seem to use online press releases differently, there were no statistically significant differences between the two in terms of the criteria they use for evaluating success. In fact, the evaluation criteria were homogenous across different size organizations and industry sectors as well. The only statistically significant difference identified young communication practitioners (under 30 years of age) as more interested than the other age groups in obtaining coverage on blogs and social media sites.

Open-ended responses to a different survey question indicate that higher level indicators such as "eyeballs" and "dollar value" are desired evaluation criteria of online press releases, but communication professionals do not know how to measure them, concludes the study.

Very few respondents indicated using social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. Even more puzzling is that less than half of respondents (48.8 percent) link to their own press releases after they have been posted online.

The most frequently mentioned challenges of online press releases, grouped into categories according to the main themes, were:

• Cutting through the clutter. This challenge speaks to the difficulty of getting a press release noticed in an information-rich environment.
  
• Targeting and distribution. Respondents often find it difficult to identify and target the specific audience for their press releases.
• Measurement. Accurate evaluation of online press release results to include not only message distribution and exposure, but also evidence of audience receipt and behavior change was another perceived challenge.
  

Please visit here to retrieve the complete PDF Whitepaper release.

Survey Reveals Surging U.S. Mobile Adoption and How Mobile Users are Spending Their Time

Prosumers and Young Professionals Lead the Way as Power Mobile Users and Early Adopters of Advanced Content and Social Networking Services

ACTON, Mass. – Azuki Systems, Inc., an innovator in the interactive mobile media technology market, today announced the results of its first annual U.S. mobile phone user survey (download report) to profile trends and emerging behavior. Over 54% of those surveyed said their mobile phone usage had increased by more than 25% over the last two years, and one in five respondents said it had increased by more than 50%. A significant catalyst behind this growth is smart phone adoption, with 62% of respondents indicating they either own or will own such a device in the next 12 months.

Despite increased adoption, almost 80% of those surveyed said they wished it were easier to access information from the Internet on their mobile phones, and an equal percentage stated they wished it were easier to access rich media on their mobile phones. The majority of those surveyed pointed to a number of current obstacles to enjoying rich media on mobile. For example, 69% felt that the long time to download and/or play media ranked among their top three barriers, and 66% felt that difficulties finding and navigating to relevant content was a top three inhibitor. A number of shortcomings were also identified for iPhone and BlackBerry users.
“Mobile device technology, as well as mobile content and application development, is on the rise.

As a result, the mobile experience is getting better with access to more content, and mobile adoption is growing at a rapid speed,” said Jim Ricotta, CEO of Azuki Systems. “However, as the survey results indicated, there is still work to be done in order to deliver truly usable mobile content to today’s mobile devices. Mobile requires a different consumption and interaction model where, unlike the desktop, it is less about browsing and more about glancing to ‘snack’ on media.”

Mobile Users – Where Does the Time Go? Regardless of which mobile device they are using, U.S. mobile phone users are spending a significant amount of time on their phones. This highlights the fact that core consumer services have expanded beyond voice to include messaging and data services, which also serve as a launch pad for broader Web and more advanced content services. Survey findings showed:

1. Gabfest: 33% talk on their mobile phones more than 10 hours per week. The youngest generation is spending even more time, with 34% of those 17 and younger talking for more than 15 hours/week.
   
2. OMG: Of the 79% who send text messages from their phones, 29% do so for more than two hours/week. Again, the younger generations prove to be power users, with 37% of those less than the age of 22 texting for more than two hours/week. With only a gradual drop-off in text messaging for 23 to 44 year-olds, a generational gap is evident with a sharp decline to almost no usage for those approaching age 60 and older.
   
3. Hooked on e-mail: 50% access their e-mails from their mobile phones, with nearly 30% of those between the ages of 35 and 44 doing so for more than two hours per week.
   
4. Going surfing: 52% access the Web via their mobile phones, and 35 to 44 year-olds are leveraging this technology the most, with 60% spending time each week surfing the Web. Perhaps fueling a significant portion of this growth was iPhone adoption, which according to the survey results appeared strongest among 23 to 44 year-olds. In addition, there was clear evidence of 23 to 34 year-olds trading up their feature phones for smart phones as they move into the corporate world.
   
5. TV time:25% access video on their mobile phones, with 88% of this group spending less than two hours/week, which may indicate a growing appetite for rich media with shorter duration viewing patterns.
   

Socialization & Monetization Survey results show that the social networking craze is starting to heat up on the third screen as well. Twenty-five percent of mobile users are accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices with one in seven respondents between the ages of 23 to 34 doing so for more than two hours/week. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed reported that they would share content via their mobile phone with their contacts from social networking sites if it were easier to do so.


The survey results also proved good news for mobile advertisers. Almost 70% of mobile users surveyed would prefer mobile ads in exchange for free access to mobile content. Additionally, if their mobile phones had location tracking capabilities that would present them with promotions for local businesses, more than 65% would take advantage of this opportunity.

The survey was conducted with over 275 U.S. mobile consumers of varying demographic backgrounds.

About Azuki Systems Azuki Systems provides the industry’s first comprehensive interactive mobile media services platform. Azuki enables content publishers and mobile operators to create, differentiate and monetize rich media services for mobile audiences. The Azuki platform provides everything needed to establish new revenue streams through the delivery of highly interactive and personalized mobile-content and social-networking services. Based in Acton, Mass., Azuki is led by an executive team that has built some of the communications industry’s most successful companies, including ArrowPoint, SightPath, Arris Networks, Acopia Networks and DataPower. For additional information, please visit http://www.azukisystems.com or call +1-978-844-5100.

New Pew Internet survey on technology and families

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

A national survey has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children -- to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together.

Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/266/report_display.asp

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project