Figures by Comscore shows that Facebook has surpassed Google in terms of “time spent”, “visits” etc. This spells good news for Facebook and not so good news for Google  (kind of like a Prisoner’s dilemma’s situation) BUT wait. I feel, its different (in a way).

My view is people will continue searching and when they search in Google (or other search engines) they have an INTENT – they are hunting for information to act on (or digest). They know what they are searching for and marketers can capitalize on that very intent by having landing pages or content that answers their search and thus convert them.

On the other hand, in social networks (e.g. Facebook), people go there to socialize, get information – spook on what their mates are doing. Sure they may post on their status seeking assurances about a particular product but their intent is rather different as when they search online. When they search using a search engine, they will prowl through forums to see reviews and then act on the reviews. However on Facebook, they just tend to take a back approach to have fun. So their motivation to go to each platform is different I argue. So how does one convert in this situation?

On a slightly related note, in communities of interest such as forums and such – commerce can work very well because they are bonded by communities of interest and by engaging in say group buy – its a very natural extension of being in a community whereas social network not so per se, as the last thing they want is to have ads shoved up their face in a social setting.

On this note, I foresee in the year 2011 and beyond, we will be seeing a fair bit of group buying going on (especially on communities of interest) and gaining further traction – its not new I must – its has also been going on but I feel that it will grow bigger…

What are your views?

P.S. I tend to see forums as communities of interest bonded by a love for a brand or a hobby whereas Facebook on the other hand is a social friend network.

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I’m sure many of you have heard of Klout score – its a measure of your online twitter influence and now it covers Facebook as well (less than the business page you are managing).

Its a pretty decent tool to measure influence – simple and pleasing to the eye (read: easily understandable) – the latter a plus point when you present to clients. I’ve used it in various aspects to measure the engagement and influence level of a campaign – didnt use Klout per se but its method of scoring i.e the scale from 1 to 10 and it settles pretty well.

An interesting measure is the influence metric – it measure the type of “people” you are attracting in twitter.

My personal influence is as below and I found it rather “convincing” – my intent is to share and learn from other in a defined community that I am interested in. Looks like it works (in a way).

What are your thoughts on Klout? How do you find it?

Keen to hear.

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Online gaming has no doubt grown over the years. Think Farmville, My Cafe, Mobster and all. These games had people’s logging in their Facebook accounts and iPhone just to ensure that their items they have cooked does not expire.

This is evident that games play a role in many people’s life. And now McDonalds sees this as an opportunity and decides to enter this space. They created a “1 day campaign” online game on Farmville whereby players will be able to grow their farm twice as fast with all the McDonalds rewards.

Looks like marketers – you want their attention and grow your brand affinity – one of the ways are online gaming. Leverage them. Interesting space here and I am of the view it has alot of potential. Other than communicate on social space, the other activity is to have fun i.e. play games.

The question now is hmm…how does it read into my business objective? Dont get carried away by all these crazes – ultimately as a brand owner – you need to answer that very question. By having this game, how does it serve my business objective?

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Google replaced its GAP certification program with the Google Adwords Certification Program and gave agencies 6 months to retake the exam.

From an agency’s point of view, I personally feel that cert is of less “value” as they have reduced the entry requirements – the total ad spent has been reduced significantly. So in a way, this program is easier to achieve for companies in its quest to get the Google Partner Certificate.

Nevertheless, I still had to take the exam to ensure that I am properly trained and have the experience

Ok I passed the exam and I am individually certified. Woohoo! Always nice to have additional certificates hanging around, especially from Google.

There you go. (For verification: Google Certification Program Verification)

Jon Chin Google Certification Program

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News has it that brands are buying Facebook Ads (great growth) in order to drive traffic to their Facebook Page (read: secure “Likes” – sorry today this metric is a something that clients seems to be fixated about).

As a marketer, what should you choose? Impressions or Clicks?

Literature in the main have suggested that if you want to brand awareness choose Impressions, if you want call to action – choose “clicks”

So what really works? . I will give a generic answer – it depends.

For me, both impressions and CPC has worked well. A recent campaign (1 month campaign) that I ran, I started with CPC and then moved on to Impressions.

It is when I moved to Impression, the stats went ballistic, my CTR was higher than usual and the social conversion increased whilst paying less. The CPC price was approx USD$0.60 and for CPM I was paying USD0.11 & Average CPC of USD0.04. Juxatpose that with the CPC I was getting at the outset i.e USD0.60. A savings of USD0.64! (of course the clients was all smiles) – better CTR and all.

Curious me decided to find out why is this the case, after much testing – one of the variables that helped was the rotation of ads – and the image of the ad. It played a big role. I did 3 ads with the same ad text but different images – the clicks were vastly different and of course results were as well.

In this particular 1 month campaign, it seems that impression had worked well – as you know there are many variables that affect the effectiveness of an ad. For the sake of brevity I’m only going to touch on 2 variables for this campaign 1) Ad image – That had significant bearing on the effectiveness and conversion. Lesson is play with multiple ads – do the neccessary testing and you can save a bundle and get much better results and 2) Clear CALL TO ACTION (CTA) – Putting the work – Join US or Like US had an impact.

I came across this mathematic formulae (Source: http://www.searchabilityinc.com/2009/03/15/facebook-ads-cpm-vs-cpc/)

Mathematically speaking, the formulae below is saying what is the condition that a CPC model would be more effective than a CPM model.  Ultimately according to the author if the following expression holds true:

I*CPC*CTR < (I/1000)*CPM, where

I = impressions

CPC = minimum CPC bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CPM = minimum CPM bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CTR = target audience’s propensity to click on your ad (fancy way of saying click-thru rate)

The expression could be satisfied if CPC and CTR are low or if CPM is high.

Well looks totally wicked. The formulae could very well work for you.

So is this a science or an art? Well my ‘answer” to them is, the questions is flawed to begin with, its to what extent this is science and to what extent this is art.

Keen to hear what successes you managed for your campaigns.

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Jon Chin wearing a Facebook user cap:

I am an avid Facebook”er” if there is such a term. I spend hours on it. Its a place where I catch up with my friends (“see whats up in their lifes – their bragging adventure etc) – to find out where they are up to.

Jon Chin wearing a marketer cap:

Sources from Facebook Singapore tells me: “Singapore has 2.4 million accounts and of course 1.8 million log in DAILY”. To a marketer, that means business.

The potential reach & frequency (read impression in the ad world) – woohoo that gets all excited. How can a marketer capitalize on all these to build its brand and people to talk about my brand so I can increase my brand profile and ultimately sales.

Hmm…is there a mismatch here? I wonder…

or is this a space that PR practitioners own after all PR dudes/dudettes say this is “earned” media not a “paid” media space… Did I conveniently leave the PR folks out?…

It seems that authenticity, non-paid means, increased transparency, engaging in conversations – one to many – seems to play into PR strengths…PR helps to “soft-sell” – so should this be a PR thingy? Interesting…

Did I miss out a category of “Jon Chin wearing the PR cap”….

Thoughts? Keen to hear your views…

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Had a great time playing moderator role organised by one of the world’s leading business school, where topics around social media were debated and how it affects businesses.

Views were exchanged and lessons learnt. I had fun (which is most important)…

The panel…From Left to Right..

1. Sarjit Singh – President of NBSAA
Mr. Andrew Tan, 2nd President of NBSAA
2. Peter Lim, Writer and Media Consultant of Plim HL, Singapore (former Editor-in-Chief of Singapore Press Holdings)
3. Jon Chin, Head Digital Strategy of ClickMedia
4. Nagalaksmi V., Account Manager of Google Adwords Singapore
5. Shalu Wasu, Associate Director of Ogilvy PR Singapore
6. Luke Soon, Principle of SAS Intelligence APAC
7. Dennis Wong, President of MBAAA
8. Bill Lee, MD of SAS Intelligence.

I had the honour to address a wide range of questions as they were raised and answered.

Topics ranging from how social media platform can be utilized in the healthcare industry while taking legal obligations into consideration; how both the ruling party and the opposite parties tap on social media platform to reach out to the voters in the coming general elections in Singapore; etc.

It was great fun and the best part I learnt stuff there!

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Mashable ran an article titled “Why you need to monitor and measure your brand on social media” . The author Maria Ogneva touched on the difference between monitoring and measurement. Very interesting article she has there.

Digital strategists look for data to better understand a particular situation and from there it attempts to offer a solution. So where does this data come from – in this context it would be listening to the conversation out there. Having been bombarded with the conversation – how do you make sense of it all? That is the question.

To monitor, there is a magnitude of tools out there, ranging from Google alerts (free) toRadian6 (paid). So what works? I cant answer that from you. For some, the free version works well, afterall, data is just data, its how you interprete the data that matters, isn’t it.

Alot of times people (read: clients) do not know the difference between monitoring and measurement (and also interpretation).

Whats is the point of monitoring – in my view the idea of monitoring is to garther insight and thereby use it to inspire strategy making. number (data) –> insights –> strategy – success in one audience generate success in another. Monitoring is pretty much useless if you cant interpreted to an action that ties in to company (campaign) objective.

Many a times, I hear companies say – so and so (competitor) have 5000 fans – in my mind (silently of course) – so what? what does these 5000 fans means? I can get you 10000 fans if you want – just give me the carrots (attractive) ones of course and I can bait. But sadly this is how it works out there. The success of a campaign is down to the number of fans…but isnt social media about conversation – candid conversation. Gone are the days of interruption marketing – we now need to engage and speak social language! So the advocates of social media says. we need interaction – we need to use their consumer language to make them act! of course in a subtle non-intrusive manner.

Typically, a successful online endeavour needs a plan and also questions that you need to ask your self.

Here are some…

• Behavioural : everything you communicate to your customers has a purpose. What do you want them to know?

• Essential : deliver information that your best propects and customers require to succeed in work or life – meet them expressed needs and wants – better still fulfil their latent needs.

• Strategic: – your efforts must be an integral part of the company overall business strategy - link your online endeavour (social media) to bottom-line results.

• Integrated Communication: Social media needs to be coherent with other modes BUT please do not just put a Press Release onto a social media platform (BIG MISTAKE).

• Targeted – you need to target your content (i.e. products precisely so that it is truly relevant to your prospects. Shift consumer behaviour via education.

• Ownership – get someone to spear head it and get that person to OWN it. I am a firm believer of people do not do what you say but what you paid. Pay for their behaviour and performance.

and last but not least – measure it! online can always be measured , but only if you have a clear understanding of your strategic communications objectives. just keep it simple – “how will we know that my content (social endeavour) is working to begin with….

What are your thoughts? I am keen to hear.

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Well I guess this depends on who you ask…

End-users would go ”cool stuff!”, privacy activists would say “its about time! and a major victory to privacy” and what about digital asset owners or digital strategist. What would be their reaction?

I reckon would be “thats not too good” I thought everything is trackable on line and how are we (agencies) going to say to our clients. Maybe oh well you see we have approximately 20% of the traffic unaccountable for and that explains why the drop in x & y. I strongly believe that this is due to the missing 20%.

Today, analytics is part and parcel of any online asset – clients demand them so to know exactly how people are surfing their sites, SEO specialists love them cause they can find out what are the keywords people use to get into the site.

Agencies (Client-side Marketers as well) use them to justify the investment (amongst many other metrics) and say how well they have done. Now with people able to opt out – would this mean a loss of valuable data that now relate to a negative relationship to the ability to generate insights that inspire a strategy?

It has been said to a strategist we need numbers to make business cases and to position our argument. So what does this mean to digital strategists. How else are they going to go our data so easily and at such low cost and so quickly!

With this opt out feature, does this signal a massive demand of quantitive/qualitative research whereby we conduct surveys or gather focus group and run modeling equations to make sense of it out.

Would this Google Analytic opt out feature ‘cripple” the digital industry? and how are digital strategists going to work around this problem? after online its seems we are very data-drive, no?

What are your thoughts? I’m keen to hear.

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