Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...The digital landscape changes fast, and pictures are a main catalyst. Netscape released the first commercially available web browser in 1994, and fewer than 15 years later Flickr housed more than 6 billion photos -- that's more than 450 times the number of photos held by the Library of Congress. In 2009 more than 2.5 billion camera-enabled devices were in the hands of would-be photogs who, in the course of a year, produced 10 percent of all photos ever taken. Instagram -- the mobile photo-sharing app that Facebook bought earlier this year for $1 billion -- measures its customer engagement in uploads-per-second. Back in the quaint old days of December 2011 -- pre-acquisition and before comScore released data showing Instagram's daily usage is now greater than Twitter's -- that engagement was 60 uploads per second. By early 2012 Facebook members were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day to the site.

"This slurry of data signals the end of the Kodak Era where we took photos on birthdays and vacations and shared them only with a small group of friends," said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate and former SVP for Netscape's browser group. "We've now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word -- what some are calling the dawn of the 'imagesphere."...

Research from a team at Harvard Business School supports Malik's claim. A 2009 study finds that 70 PERCENT OF ALL ACTIVITY INSIDE SOCIAL NETWORKS REVOLVES AROUND PHOTOS. Keep in mind that the study was conducted in a time when Facebookers were uploading a mere 31 million photos a day, and MySpace was still relevant enough to be included in a study of social-media sites....

[I highly recommend this post for marketers, content pros and PR. It provides a very strong rationale for visual content in anything to do with the Internet. ~ Jeff]

Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay.

Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site....

One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark [Otuteye] explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says....

[Moving beyond the last click with a promising social media measurement tool - JD]

A four-step process for generating useful knowledge from social data.

Big data is great. But we should consider that we've actually had more data than we can reasonably use for a while now. Just on the marketing front, it isn't uncommon to see reports overflowing with data and benchmarks drawn from millions of underlying data points covering existing channels like display, email, website, search, and shopper/loyalty — and new data streams such as social and mobile engagement, reviews, comments, ratings, location check-ins and more.

In contrast to this abundant data, insights are relatively rare. Insights here are defined as actionable, data-driven findings that create business value. They are entirely different beasts from raw data. Delivering them requires different people, technology, and skills — specifically including deep domain knowledge. And they're hard to build.

...Here's a four-step marketing data-centered process that doesn't stop at the data, but focuses instead on generating insights relevant to specific segments or affinity groups...

[Good suggestions for social media measurement from the Harvard Business Review - JD]

If you're debating the power of social media for branding, here's more proof that it matters.

About 50% percent of consumers think a brand’s Facebook page is more useful than a brand’s website, a new study suggests.

Market research company Lab42 — which surveyed 1,000 social media users about how they interact with brands on Facebook — found that consumers are viewing a brand’s Facebook presence as more important than ever.

In fact, about 82% of respondents said Facebook page is a good place to interact with brands. But one of the top reasons to follow a brand on Facebook is to print coupons and discounts. The study revealed that 77% of those who “Like” a brand on Facebook have saved money as a result.

Consumers (73%) also noted that they have no issue with un-Liking a brand on the site if they post too often.

For a full look at how a brand’s Facebook presence is viewed and valued, check out the infographic from Lab42 below....