Mike MacLeod

91% of Tech Decision Makers Use Social Media

// February 24th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Forrester has recently released a report titled “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers.”  Here are some highlights of the results:

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91% of these technology decision-makers are Spectators.

Your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. 69% of them said they were using this media for business purposes.

55% of these decision-makers are Joiners

Your buyers are members of facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. They are on Twitter too.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the only people on such networks are college kids and stay at home moms.

43% are Creators and 58% are Critics.

Your buyers are making their own blogs. They are uploading videos and articles.  If they are not creating their own, they are sharing and commenting on others.  How many of those articles are about you? How many are about your competitors?

Are you too late?

Marketers continue to do a better job using social media to reach out to consumers. Similarly, researchers are starting to find ways to use this media to learn about consumers.  But not much is going on in B2B.

If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, you’re late. But most of your competitors are probably late too. Take advantage of this. Go find out where your buyers are hanging out online and join them. Talk to them. Learn from them. Share with them.

The full report is available for purchase here.

Leaders Discuss Future of Social Media

// February 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

During Social Media Week 2009, Abrams Research surveyed over 200 social media leaders from across North America. Here are some interesting – but not terribly surprising – results.

• A whopping 40% of respondents picked Twitter as the number one social media service for businesses. LinkedIn came in a distant second (21.3%), followed by YouTube (18.8%), with Facebook an even more distant fourth at 15.3%.
• When asked which social media service they’d be most likely to pay for, 32.2% chose Facebook – followed by 29.7% choosing business networking site LinkedIn. The contrast of Facebook’s bells-and-whistles features (photos, status updates, newsfeed, tagging) with the bare-bones networking functionality of LinkedIn suggests that many people find social networking most valuable for making professional connections. Twitter – the top pick for business use – came in third, with 21.8%.
• A paltry 1.5% said they would pay for MySpace – in a category where Facebook was the runaway winner – and only 2% said they’d recommend it for business. It came dead last in both categories – where it used to be the runaway leader.

You can see the full results of the survey here.  In the meantime, here are my personal responses to the questions:

1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?

LinkedIn. Facebook would be a close second but I believe that a very large percentage of Facebook users would move elswhere if it became a pay service.  LinkedIn would maintain a much higher percentage of users.

2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?

Twitter. The intmacy that can be gainedwith users (customers) is unmatched.

3. Which social media service will be the first to die?

Bebo.com.  Actually, it’s impassible to pick the death of any such sites.  I can’t believe anyone still uses MySpace, yet they still have millions of active users.  Bebo however just seems to want to be a little bit of everyone (facebook, YouTube) but they aren’t as good and don’t have any differentiators. But they will likely still be around several years from now.

4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?

Burger King.  Even though facebook quashed it, their plan to give away free Whoppers in exchange for the sacrifice of  friends was pure genious.

5. What’s the best way to monetize social media?

“Freemium” use, i.e. a free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options (i.e. storage, analytics).  The “free level” maximizes the size of the universe and also gets the die-hards hooked, wanting more that they are willing to pay for.

6. What’s the biggest challenge facing social networking services?

Developing something that is new (niche, application, technology) and keep things fresher than the eventual copycats.

7. What social networking feature is the most critical for everyday users?

Tie – Status / Newsfeed.  I guess technically, status updates are part of the newsfeed.

Seth Gets It

// February 17th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I’m starting to feel a little more confident these days that more people are getting it. From Seth Godin’s blog:

Five tips for better online surveys

1. Every question you ask is expensive. (Expensive in terms of loyalty and goodwill). Don’t ask a question unless you truly care about the answer. This means that a vague question with vague answers (extremely satisfied…acceptable…extremely dissatisfied and no scale to compare them to) is a total waste of time. What action will you take based on that? It’s smarter to ask, “how much would you say lunch was worth?”
2. Every question you ask changes the way your users think. If you ask, “which did you hate more…” then you’ve planted a seed.
3. Make it easy for the user to bail. If you have 20 questions (that’s a lot!) make it easy to quit after five and have those answers still count. If you waste my time and then don’t count my answers, see #2.
4. Make the questions entertaining and not so serious, at least some of them. Boring surveys deserve the boring results they generate.
5. Don’t be afraid to shake up the format. Instead of saying, “Here are ten things, rank them all on a scale of one to five…” why not let people compare things? “We had two speakers, Bob and Ray. Who was better?”

Bottom line: before you let the survey guys run a survey of your loyal customer base, make them pay you with resources you can use to reinvigorate those users you just bothered.

Market Research Room in FriendFeed

// February 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I’ll write more soon about how much I love friendfeed. 

For now, just go check out the Market Research room I created.  It currently agregates news and information about MR from 17 different sources (new suggestions welcome). The room includes blogs, news sources, and even twitter feeds.

You don’t even need to join friendfeed to enter the room.