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Yesterday .SE – The Internet Infrastructure Foundation released their annual report “The Swedes and the Internet“. The 2011 edition is very interesting from a Social Media perspective for several reasons.

The most noticeable one is the huge increases in usage of Social Media, and the amount of people using mobile internet.

According to this diagram, the amount of people using Social Media has more than doubled since 2008. No other usage category has had that kind of growth. And as you can see, almost all people aged 16-25 are visiting social networks. What does this huge increase in Social Media usage mean? In my opinion, it simply means one thing: A lot of people of all ages are connected to social networks. Do you want to be where the people are? Thought so!

A fun fact: At ages 12-15 only 1% of boys read blogs every day, while the same number for girls is 52%!

The report The Swedes and the Internet can be found here, unfortunately it’s still only available in Swedish. Do you have any questions about the stats, or have any other comments, feel free to well, comment, or contact me!

A few days ago, we had a round table soup evening to follow up the seminar Digital Kommunikation och Trender from Handelskammardagarna. We talked about it on Twitter and encouraged people to ask questions. Joel Börjesson sent us the following tweet:

We had a short tweet exchange about the matter, which continued in a chat discussion in the evening. To summarize the whole discussion including Twitter, it went something like this:

Joel: Just for fun, since I couldn’t be there: What are your favorite methods of analyzing ROI and metrics on your Social Media platforms?

Björn: Social Media is so much more personal that it is hard to measure Return On Investment. While I’m sure you somehow measure ROI in personal relationships, do you really do it with figures and graphs?

Joel: All social media is measurable. Look at it this way. Social media is really much like any lunch you might have with a client. Say you buy that client or partner lunch, that costs you $20, but what you might get from that lunch, might be much more valuable than the lunch you just bought your client. Say for example that the conversation during the lunch between you and client result in a new possibility of doing business or a prolonged contract. Now there suddenly you have a new business plan or a prolonged contract, paying back that investment of $20 ten thousand fold.

Björn: But what if you don’t get that contract? It’s still worth something, right? How can you measure that?

Joel: Lunch just like Social media is not about the investment you do in the actual lunch or the social media implementation but what you do with the conversation or the platform that you invest in. The more conversations you have and the more time you invest into social media, the more return you will see. Social media and lunches are not about instantly crunching numbers, but more about creating long term dialogues, discussions and collaborations. By just a small investment such as a lunch or a social media tool (which you often can get for free), you can start building long term dialogues resulting in return of investments in a not too far away future. With better understanding between companies as well as consumers through dialogue, greater business decision and greater return on investments will be made.

Björn: Great points, but the question still stands: Can you really put that into numbers? Obviously, a Facebook page filled with positive comments is a great thing, but how do you decide how much a comment, blog post or tweet is worth?

Joel: While there is value to simply measuring the amount of tweets and comments you get, the real value lies in what KIND of input you receive. To turn it around, you can think about how much you would have lost if you did not receive certain messages. If you start distributing a faulty product, some people will notice it, and the first place to complain today is in social media. Had you not been listening to what is being said online, the damage, both economically and reputation wise would have been much more severe. An example of this is the Kryptonite story, where someone realized that you could pick a bike lock in less than ten seconds with a pen, recorded it and put it on YouTube.

Björn: Super! So a way to measure the value of a good dialogue online could actually be to imagine the economic loss of missing out on key information to be found there. Awesome! Thank you Joel for a great discussion and input on this matter! High5!

A short note on the quote: although Albert Einstein is usually credited as the author, he is not, according to the blog Quote Investigator.

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We get inspired my tough questions about a field we are passionate about – Digital Trends and Communication. Yesterday, we gathered fans and great people for an evening of dialogue and soup together with our friends at DTRT. Thank you to all for your questions and a great conversation both IRL and in various social media channels (#thaisoppa on Twitter). We got inspired. High5!

Thomas Ivarsson, CEO at Tivalux won a prize for the best question

PS – If you want to get your hands on the Faktum-calender, get in touch!

Yesterday Twingly, a blog trackback service, launched its own Analysis feature. According to Anton Johansson, Product Strategist at Twingly, the service is targeted at PR agencies helping their clients keeping an eye on the blogosphere. So what is Twingly Insight?

Twingly Insight is not going to be a Monitoring tool like Meltwater Buzz. Instead it will give the user access to the huge database (500,000 new entries per day, according to Twingly.com) of blog posts that Twingly has gathered, and search it for the keywords you are interested in. One thing Twingly Insight provides that most other services don’t is a wide array of meta data, mainly concerning stats like trackbacks (“blogs about this blog post”), a “blog score”, etc, helping the user in finding the key influencers.

Not having used Twingly Insight (yet!), I can not give you a rundown on how it actually works, but through Twingly’s website you will find a demo version and an example on how it’s supposed to be used. It sure looks promising though, and considering how many cool partners they already have, I look forward to see what the guys are up to next!

Here are some other news on the subject:
Twingly släpper analysverktyg - Article in Swedish from dagensmedia.se
The official launch blog post – from blog.twingly.com

This week, let us take a break from the apps, services and features used to monitor your presence online. Instead, we will have a look on one of the terms you will read or hear about in reports: Reach. What does reach mean in Social Media, and how do we calculate it?

The fastest way to explain reach would be: How many people saw your message, update, movie or tweet? However there is more to it, and the way it is defined in Social Media differs among the different networks and channels.

Curtesy of http://helen-lingard.com/

Reach according to Facebook
There are two variations of reach in Facebook’s world: Organic and Viral.
When you like a page on Facebook, you will from that moment get updates from that page. The more interested you are in the page (according to Facebooks algorithms), the higher up in your news feed they will go. This is defined as organic reach. Facebook Insights tells you the number of unique people who have seen at least one of these updates the last week.

If you share a post made by a page, and your friends see it, it is defined as viral reach. Actually, if you like a post or comment on it, it might turn into a story on your friend’s news feeds. Really successful pages should therefor always strive to create engaging content, leading to news stories outside your page’s own reach, thereby increasing the number of potential new fans.

A graph showing the reach of a page I manage

An easy way to see how well your page is doing is to look at the box saying “People talking about this”. This is the number of people who have, in one way or another, created a news story about your page (and therefore creating viral reach) in the last week. According to my observations today, most pages have less than 10% of their fans actually creating a stories.

Reach on Twitter
On Twitter, there is a slight problem with measuring reach, namely that Twitter itself does not offer any proper statistics. Therefore you have to rely on third party services. One of them is Tweetreach, which I will probably write an introduction to in the weeks to come. Tweetreach works somewhat like a search engine. You enter a tweet, hashtag or link, and get a report on how many people it has reached. Since Tweetreach can not know if your tweet is being seen or not, they define reach as the total number people who have had the tweet (or #hashtag if that is what you search for) sent to their timeline.

The biggest potential with Twitter is the possibility for a certain phrase or hashtag to start trending. This means that it is one of the most used the last hour or so. With clever marketing skills, or just tipping attendees at an event about the “official hashtag” of the day, you can give your reach a boost otherwise unattainable.

Do you have any other questions about reach, Twitter or Facebook? Contact me!

How can a group of a few hundred, a few thousand or over a million share their opinion, experiences and stories?

By using a Twitter # hashtag.

A hash tag is a simple way to group thousands of tweets, making it easier for people to follow and participate in specific events or topics of common interest. Hashtags are extremely useful at events such as conferences where people agree on a specific hashtag; so that all tweets for that conference can be easily aggregated.

Another plus, is if a hashtag is actively used for a period of time it can start to trend on Twitter, thereby exposing an event or topic of discussion to many more people. For example, an event we socialized a couple of weeks ago for Handelskammardagarna, contained the hashtag #VHK2011.  So when using Twitter search the participants could find all the tweets using this hashtag. This allowed the audience and participants to see all the different points of view as the seminars and days events unfolded. The result was 1400 tweets over two days, trending on Twitter in Sweden in 5th position the 1st day and 3rd on the second day. A great achievement for Handelskammaren.

Finally, creating a hashtag is an easy way to establish a permanent, searchable record, available for the future.

If you want to more about socializing your next event, give us a call.

This is the third Thursday in my series on the overwhelming amounts of Social Media monitoring and measurement tools out there. Awoque had the pleasure to spend some forty minutes on stage with Google at  Handelskammardagarna. Here is a post on their tool Google Analytics. Analytics does not do what MBuzz or Facebook Insights do. While those two are great at covering Twitter and Facebook, Google analytics excels at website statistics.

As with any Google product, setting up is not too complicated. You need a Google account (which most of us have today), and access to your website’s code. This is where many people might start getting nervous. Fear not. As with all Google’s products, they want you to use it so bad they have made it as easy as it could possibly be. You get the code and instructions on where in the code where you are supposed to paste it. Then allow Analytics about 24 hours to start gathering data and you will be ready to go.

When you log into Analytics, you will find a list of the sites you track. Click on one will bring you directly to the statistics that might be the only thing you care about: how many visitors your site has had. It’s a simple graph. Up is good, down is not so good.

What happened on the 20th/21st of September?

After that you can dive right into a plethora of tools, all powerful but still simple to use. An important and interesting thing you should check out is the behavioral tab. This could be your most valuable asset while planning the strategy for your blog. The behavior tab shows your visitors actions on your site, how long they’re staying and what they click on. There is a lot of information to be found, but I would like to highlight:

• the Bounce Rate (what percentage of people actually never clicks on anything on your site?)
• Average Time On Site (how long do people actually stay?) areas.
• Bounce rate is interesting because if people are actually not clicking on content, you should probably try to rewrite, create your material.
• Also, make sure that the message you want to give is actually right there on the front page, because people will not go looking for it!

83% of visitors stay for less than 10 seconds. Is it worth it to write a three page post?

This site is obviously not a place where people spend a lot of time, but the question is why? Figuring out what’s wrong with a site (if it’s not intended to be a short stop for the average web surfer) is usually not easy, but trying different kinds of content might give you an idea on how to encourage people to stay for a few minutes longer than before.

Of course information you can get out of analytics does not stop there. If you are interested, you can learn what people searched for to get to you. If someone sent them a link or if they simply typed in the address. Analytics will actually tell you what browser people are using, and even if your visitors use mobile devices or regular computers!

Do you want to know more about how Analytics work and how it might help you and your company improve your visits and engagement? Don’t hesitate to contact me!

It is with great pleasure that we present Awoque’s new social site.

In the spirit of being social, we have discussed, posted and engaged with peers, partners and clients to get their valuable input into developing our new online presence. Today, we are extremely proud to present our new social site.  A space that accurately reflects our mission, personality and passion for working with social networking/media.

Awoque’s three strategic objectives: to enlighten, develop and transform business through social media have also been essential in the new strategy for our web and digital channels. In parallel with the web process, we have developed a richer graphical profile. One that consists of key graphic elements that communicate our visual identity.

Finally, our special thanks goes to the Raket Reklambyrå team for designing and developing the social site.

Our best,
The Awoque Team

What is more powerful eyeballs or engagement? At a coffee store last week in Göteborg’s Central Station I pondered this, as people were tapping away on their tablets or smart phones. While, just across from the cafe was a large, rotating, advertising display, competing for audience attention.

Traditional marketing such as television and print relies on “eyeballs” to get the message across with no emphasis on the consumer. This makes traditional marketing one-sided and flat to younger generations. Unlike, social media which is about “engaging” with your potential customer. Social Media gives your company it’s voice or personality enabling new and existing customers to interact with your organisation on a more personal level. Social channels such as Facebook and Twitter allow people the opportunity to voice their opinions about your services or products in a casual manner.

With the percentage upon which people act on traditional or forced marketing estimated to be in the 1-2% range. It is easy to see why more and more companies are becoming interested in social media. Especially, when you factor in the rapid take-up of tablets and smart-phones.

We had a really good time awoqueing FashionDAYS at the Auto7H arena in Borås this week.

Fashion shows, the release of the new BMW 1-series, mingling, champagne, lots of work and High 5′s.

It really is a blessing to be able to combine my interest in fashion and design with my social media work at Awoque. Apart from our task to capture the spirit of the event and socialize it for our client. It was interesting to work with a multi-oriented audience that enjoyed the fact that FashionDAYS mixed fashion with cars, as well as other designs. FashionDays is much more than a garment event, it was a creative experience.