Tag Archives: social media marketing

How Many Canadians Are On Twitter?

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Danielle| 6 Comments

Twitter is a social communication tool – while it is useful for brands in communicating to their customers and for allowing consumers to share the brand to their followers, in Canada the use of Twitter in this respect does have some limitations (for some) and opportunities (for others). While this should not discount anyone getting a Twitter account, the level of investment should vary based on the suitability of the brand for social media marketing via Twitter.

Twitter In Canada: The Numbers

So how many people are there  using Twitter in Canada anyways? Is it worth it? At the end of the day, is it a numbers things? Getting a clear answer on how many users there are in Canada is not easy. There are no good estimates – I found one indicating 40% of Canadians use Twitter which clearly is wrong.

First some facts about Twitter and Canada:

  1. There are 75 million users on Twitter
  2. 80% of users tweet have fewer than 10 tweets, 40% have never tweeted
  3. 4.36% of Twitter users are from Canada
  4. The population of Canada is 34,074,000

The facts armed with some basic percentages math and here is what I come up with:

  • 9.59% of Canadians have a Twitter account – 3 270 000 Canadians
  • 1.9% more than 10 tweets – 654 000 Canadians

I am guessing that a vast majority of Twitter users in Canada are either from the early adopters/tech segment or corporate/business accounts interested in social media marketing for their products and services. This being said, the potential of Twitter must not be overhyped but on the other hand, should not be underestimated.

Twitter In Canada: The Users

I will leave the corporate/business accounts aside, those being more relevant to a discussion on B2B marketing – here I want to focus on B2C marketing with regards to the “early adopters” that are currently using Twitter in Canada.

Most Twitter users in Canada are between the age of 15-24 – you have a younger, with-the-times group that enjoys technology. They are savvy about how technology works and likely have been marketed to online in many ways throughout the years and are more likely to “learn for themselves” than just trust the word of a stranger. They spend a great deal of time “connected”. There are subgroups within this as well, but generally these qualities are common among personal Twitter users in Canada. This group wants consumer electronics and gadgets, software, gaming, music, news, events, technology updates, interesting products. They want innovation, creativity, sincerity. And if this group likes your product they will recommend it and people will be more likely to listen to their recommendations.

Twitter In Canada: The Bottom Line

Sure, 654 000 Canadians sounds like small peanuts, especially when you consider not all accounts are personal accounts. But when you consider that Twitter accounts are integrated to Facebook and other social media platforms and that tweets spread via word of mouth as well, the power of Twitter cannot be discounted. Especially when you consider the power of the group wielding the accounts.

Update: Follow-up post about Canadian Twitterers in May 2011 with new statistics and sources, accompanied by results from Twitter in Canada survey

Popularity: 60% [?]

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Marketing

Tagged , , , ,

The Social Business: Beyond Marketing

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Danielle| Leave a comment

Social has been a catchword around marketing circles for a while, but now social is being used as a model for all business practices and strategies. The benefits of running a social business are undeniable. Designed consciously around sociological rules and social tools, having many implications for the businesses from within and without. Social customer relationship management, the corporate reaction to catch up with the fleeting customer, while plagued with challenges of scalability, includes brand monitoring and community interaction to listen to clients or customers. But this is not just a marketing or customer service concept, a social business must include an internally open culture based on sharing and collaboration.

This great webinar Social Business: Taking “social” to the core of your organization by Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, Joshua-Michele Ross, is a great introduction to these concepts.

In the video, they go on to say that 2010 is the Year of Social Business Policy, and they just might be right considering the Department of Defense has recently release their social media policy.

The social business, then, should exist within all sectors of the business:

  1. Internal – employees of the company, lower level staff to management
  2. External – customer and client relationship management

Internal Culture of Openness and Innovation

It is sad that not more managers are eager to encourage and maintain this model for their businesses. No employee should be too low to speak to the highest employee in the company, no idea should be considered based on the rank of an employee on the corporate ladder, and a frank and open environment should allow for opportunities for all employees to share their creative and innovative ideas.

There are obstacles to overcome – management might be resistant or on the other employees might not see the value in participating. But if the heads of the business can embrace the open culture of the social business, it should not be hard to rally the troops. One thing people want more than money is a dream and social business is about people.

External Candour and Responsiveness

Customer relationship management within a social model is a newer idea, and while the concepts of brand monitoring and community participation seem relatively easy to understand, the issue of scale is where most companies will find their greatest challenges. The addition of new tools and new areas of consumer behavior to monitor, while extremely exciting, must be integrated into a new social customer relationship management policy and process to ensure that it all does not become just noise.

But besides the challenges, adding social to your customer relationship management program allows for much deepened loyalties and consumer trust. One to one dialogue stimulates a solid business relationship if the proper best use practices are understood.

Any plans to take a look at your business model given the technological changes that allow for more social discourse? Do you know of any companies doing this admirably?

Popularity: 2% [?]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Marketing

Tagged , , , ,

Augmented Reality Marketing Primer

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Danielle| 1 Comment

The expansion of the “real world” using virtual computer-generated imagery is by no means a new idea – this once was the stuff of science fiction. Now, with developments in imaging, location-based applications and mobile data transfer, augmented reality has become a hot topic among marketers as brands struggle to cope with changing media and marketing rules. Augmented reality combines the real and the virtual to create a 3D interactive environment that appears in real-time. In the next year, there are predictions of great strides in augmented reality – Juniper Research has predicted $2 million in spending on AR in 2010, and growing to $714 million by 2014.

There are several different tracks of augmented reality currently being used or in development, but the retailer’s main concerns should be the use of AR in annotation and visualization.

Annotation: Annotate objects and environments with information: these could be public annotations whereby information was drawn from public databases, or private whereby private notes could be attached to objects and environments. For example, a mobile could display information about the products on the shelves as the user walks through a store.

Visualization: Visualization can be used to preview objects in the real world or to gain x-ray vision into real objects using a database containing information about the structure of the object. For example, a user could preview on their computer how different glasses would look on their face (this has been done, Ray-ban).

Likely the most authentic augmented reality experience would come from the use of a see-through HMD, much like the stereotypical virtual reality goggles but instead these are transparent in that the real world can still be seen with superimposed virtual objects and environments. This is not a very feasible format for marketers – instead the best way of building an augmented reality marketing piece would be to use a monitor-based configuration to be viewed in the browser or, better yet, go mobile. Mobile phones are increasingly intuitive and the GPS and imaging capabilities of modern phones is particularly conducive to augmented reality applications.

Augmented reality marketing campaigns have been employed lately by a number of big brands and while many of these approaches are no more than gimmicks, there are many viable uses for augmented reality that should make retailers sit up and pay attention. A few notable examples of augmented reality include the Esquire AR edition which included extra content when certain pages were captured by one’s webcam, Adidas shoes has introduced a new line of shoes that will double as game controllers, as well as more functional uses such as that by US Postal Service that allows users to compare the size of the object they want to send with boxes available.

The challenge here is weeding out the gimmicky uses of this technology to find pertinent, practical uses that could genuinely save consumers time and energy, and coincidentally shortening the sales cycle. Augmented reality allows the user to see the real world with with virtual objects superimposed upon it, which enhances the user’s perception of and interaction with the real world. Virtual objects can be made to display information that cannot directly be detected by the senses and this information can be made to help with real world tasks and aiding in the pre-shopping experience.

There is no doubt that augmented reality has several applicable uses that will only grow as the technology develops, but do you see any lasting value in using augmented reality as a marketing tactic or is it a gimmick that will quickly fade away?

Popularity: 21% [?]

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Marketing

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Is Your Carbonated Beverage Social Enough?

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Danielle| 1 Comment

Social media is not new to the big brands of carbonated beverages – Pepsi and Coca-Cola have both been participating on social networking and media sites for quite a while. In matching announcements recently, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have declared that they are going to spend less on traditional media and advertising outlets, instead opting to spend the big bucks on social media campaigns. It turns out, however, that they have been trying to connect with consumers for a while and we either were not listening or did not liked what we heard.

The Pepsi [Social Media] Challenge

Pepsi has not had luck thus far using social media to expand their brand reach online in both Canadian and American spheres. The Pepsi AMP iPhone App was a distasteful mess, leaving many people wondering: What were they thinking?! The application “Before You Score” was created as a tool to help men get women, not very classy and not as funny as was intended. In Canada, an initiative to get fans to use a Pepsi-approved cheer at the hockey events was another near miss that has left them enough negative response to dismiss any positive results that might have been achieved.

Now, Pepsi is opting to drop their usual Super Bowl commercial campaign in favour of the Pepsi Refresh Project, a $20 million dollar campaign that is pretty much the Pepsi version of Google’s Project 10^100. Muy original. The campaign was launched yesterday, but apparently already there have been problems with submission forms and buzz on Facebook about problems with the idea submission website. And while they say they want to refresh the world, what they really mean is that the ideas must benefit a community or neighbourhood in the United States.

Don’t Go To Them, Coca-Cola Will Come To You

And, mirroring the announcement from Pepsi, Coca-Cola will be turning their attention to social networks by turning focus from their campaign sites to their social networking and media presences online. The Coca-Cola Facebook page is wildly popular already (over 4 million fans), likely due to the fact that the fan page was not created by the Coca-Cola company at all. It was created and maintained by two fans of the soda, and when Facebook instituted rules about branded names only being used by the brands that owned them, Coca-Cola teamed up with the two guys who built the page, a bold and savvy move as they are truly allowing the fans to take ownership of the brand here. Their main strategy will be to put an end to the multitude of campaign websites and to divert these to social channels online. Coca-Cola’s interactive marketing manager Prinz Pinakatt explains that they “would like to place [their] activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

Let The Soda Pop Social Media War Begin

Sometimes social media succeeds because of luck, sometimes because of a solid strategy that is well thought out and researched. Either way it seems to me that the Soda Kings have a long way to go. While Pepsi will likely generate some positive online buzz, not to mention offline buzz as the grants are distributed and put into action, I don’t think it is wise to drop something as important as their Super Bowl commercial. I would like to see a Super Bowl commercial that is made from a great number of user-generated videos in a huge contest – it would make a stunning collage of American culture. They could save on the cost of paying Britney Spears this way. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, are forgetting that social media users are fickle and could just as easily change their mind about Facebook in 2011. While too many campaign sites are unnecessary, it would be wise to invest their time (personal, human time) in connecting with consumers on their own websites as well as Facebook.

Do you think that Coca-Cola and Pepsi need to work on building a community online, or do you think, like me, that they just need to figure out way to get their offline community going online? Which one do you prefer: Coca-Cola or Pepsi? Would you connect with Pepsi if you only drank Coca-Cola?

Popularity: 9% [?]

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Marketing

Tagged , , , , ,

Are You Monitoring Your Online Location? Meet Foursquare, Gowalla & Friends

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Danielle| Leave a comment

Last week Foursquare changed how they tag locations and this means it is available everywhere in Canada. According to their website:

You can use foursquare anywhere in the world!  Check-in at the Statue of Liberty in NYC, the Golden Gate bridge in SF, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpu  or the Arch de Triumph in Paris!   Back in the day, we were limited to select cities, but now you can check-in anywhere you please!

Back in November, Pete Cashmore proposed that “the Twitter of 2010 is Foursquare”. A location-based real-time social network, this mobile service includes a Foursquare API for third party developers as well as Foursquare for Business, which allows local businesses to offer deals via the service. Users “check-in” when they arrive and can vie for top number of check-ins for specific locations to become “mayor” of that location.

There are similar sites: Gowalla is more a geo-game site, Brightkite, Loopt and Google Latitude. Gowalla is sligthly different, allowing a sort of virtual geo-caching game between users, and would likely stand apart from this group. Foursquare does dominate however and combined with the API and business solution, will likely not be threatened by the mild competition.

For Business This Means…

Location-based social networking should be very attractive to brands and businesses – this adds social value to the brick and mortar locations that are visited each day by mobile users. The value of being represented here is much more tangible and easier to understand than with regards to many other aspects of the social web, in addition participating is much easier to comprehend. The confusion that has arisen in the participation of many retailers using Twitter for example should not be as pronounced in this case. Foursquare has a viable service to offer businesses – you arrive at a location and check-in. Based on this check-in, you can connect with every arrival by offering them deals, making friends with people who check-in, helping them after their check-in.

Here are some examples of how easily this is applied:

  • Check-in at a pizza place 5 times, on 6th check-in get a free pizza
  • The natural competition to be mayor for a hot new club
  • A promotional “rally” where individuals must check-in at all locations, could be organized by all businesses involved to promote themselves > complete rally and get gift card to be used at those locations (ie. London Ontario Richmond Row)

For Users This Means… Much More

Okay, so this is great for businesses. But why is Foursquare important to users? Quite simple. In any discussion of social networking online you will hear talk of the social graph – for example the social connections and webs that are interwoven on Facebook. Imagine if you could take this social graph and embed into onto a moving, real-time map of the world. This is Foursquare. See the social graph move around their geographic area, and connect with people AND locations.

Popularity: 7% [?]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Marketing

Tagged , , , ,