The three key watchwords from the report are presence, frequency and processes.  Other priorities include more robust social media management, more social media presence and mobile.

Key Findings from the 2012 State of Social Media Marketing Report by Awareness

The key challenges reported by marketers was funding (and finding) the resources necessary and measuring returns on the social media investments.  This is great news for social media practictioners who have experience in creating and curating content, and for experts in measuring and analyzing social media returns and performance.  There are still too few of these experienced resources who have hands-on expertise in working across multiple industries and situations.

As far as budgets are concerned, companies with limited money to spend will focus on increasing presence across social media networks.  Companies with moderate budgets are planning on investing in social media monitoring platforms while companies with larger budgets will spend their money on social media management tools and developing scalable processes.

You can download your own copy of the report from this landing page or view the embedded Slideshare version below (courtesy of Elizabeth Lupfer of The Social Workplace).

More about Awareness can be found at these links:

• Awareness website
• Awareness software products
• Awareness on Twitter
• Awareness – Social Media Best Practices on Facebook
• Awareness on LinkedIn

This is another reason why I love WordPress.com.  Wordpress sent me an annual report for my blog last week and I didn’t even have to ask for it.  They also make it fun by adding some animated fireworks, displaying the results in a pleasing graphical way, and thanking their “helper monkeys” for helping prepare the stats.

Highlights include:

• 32 new blog posts
• 29,000 blog views

In case you missed these posts, here are my most viewed posts in 2011 – and thanks to the “long-tail” effects of blogging, only one of the most popular posts was actually written in 2011!

1. Gamification is Everywhere — But What Is It?  October 2011
2. My Social Media Job Description October 2008
3. 7 Social Media Must-Do’s for the Restaurant Industry  April 2010
4. Confused About Community Registration? August 2008
5. Sizing Up the Social Media Software Market  June 2009

Click here to see my complete annual report.

Thank you WordPress!

While Hubspot’s primary focus is to sell a comprehensive Inbound Marketing platform, they do an excellent job with providing free resources and tools to promote the concept of Inbound Marketing.  And the new Marketing Grader tool is a homerun in my book – so much so that I knew I had to write a blog post to showcase what it can do.

To start the grading process, you enter the URL of the website you want to measure.  You can also add up to two competing websites for comparison purposes.  For my testing purposes, I used a company and industry that I was familiar with as I used to work there for more than three years.

Hubspot Marketing Grader - Summary Results

The summary calculates an overall score on a 100 point scale and then analyzes how the website is doing for Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) and Analytics.  Not only does the tool provide a percentage score of how well the website is doing, it also identifies the top recommendations to improve the score.

For example, the Top 3 Things to Do for the Top of the Funnel include very specific recommendations for improvement:

It is interesting to note that a URL for the iRise blog was found, but the blog has not been active for more than a year and the link currently redirects a user to the homepage.  So, iRise is getting credit for a blog even though it is currently not accessible or active.

Similar recommendations were provided for the Middle of the Funnel:

According to the Marketing Grader blog post on the Hubspot website, the new tool is supposed to help marketers understand:

• Competitive Benchmarking: Is my marketing more or less effective than my competition?
• Lead Generation: Are my marketing efforts generating enough leads and sales?
• Mobile Marketing: Is my web presence optimized for mobile devices?
• Social Media: How effectively are we using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in our marketing?
• Blogging: Is my blog driving results that justify the time investment, or are we wasting time doing the wrong things?
• Overall Analysis: What are the strong points and shortcomings in our marketing?

Overall, this is a great tool and resource for improving your marketing function.  The tool has an appealing interface and there is a lot of information included in the report along with explanatory links.  My recommendation is to Run, Don’t Walk and turn the new Marketing Grader loose on your own website.  Did I mention that the new Marketing Grader is FREE?

For more background information on Marketing Grader, check out these blog posts from Hubspot product manager Karen Rubin in the OnStartups.com website – Insider Tips from Hubspot’s Launch of Marketing Grader or from the Hubspot blog – Hubspot Launches Free Marketing Grader Tool to Replace Website Grader.

To make it easier for me to find these resources in the future, I am consolidating all of my recent community management tweets into a blog post.

Enjoy!

5 Essential Traits for Community Managers by @stuartcfoster in @mashable…http://ow.ly/7y8ZW

10 Community Manager Tools You Might Not Know by @Renee_Warren ow.ly/7vsdf

Online Community Managers: When Community Should Be About You — from @Kommein ow.ly/7vsaR

4 Ways to Make Your Professional Online Community More Fun | by @Joshua_D_Paul in @B2Community ow.ly/7mP6O #gamification

Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire A Community Manager – from @armano in- Harvard Business Review ow.ly/7ksFc #socialmedia

The Future of Online Community | by @vdimauro in Social Media Today ow.ly/7eoHP - look for specialized private online communities

Altimeter: The Two Career Paths of the Corporate Social Strategist. Be Proactive or Become ‘Social Media Help Desk’ « from @JOwyang - ow.ly/7t1bi

“My Chapter on #Gamification: From Behavior Model to Business Strategy” – a wealth of resources from @mich8elwu ow.ly/7xf4O

Games, gamers and business strategy… In CIO.com #gamification m.blogs.cio.com/cio-role/16614…

According to Mason and Ireland, Shaq makes about $5 million per year by tweeting to his 4.4 million followers, but he does it with a sense of humor and wit.  On the other hand, Ochocinco appears to blatantly plug his products to his 2.9 million followers.  You can follow the entire discussion with John and Steve from yesterday’s Mason & Ireland show at this link.

For me, it was interesting to hear a social media story spill over into sports talk radio, and the topic generated a bit of debate.  They ultimately posed the question – is there anything ethically wrong with paid tweeting?

In the article about the New Orleans Saints’ player tweeting for the Times-Picayune, the author stated:

The idea of paying players to promote the news site raised a red flag for media ethics educators who say it can create the appearance of an inappropriate relationship between reporters and the subjects they cover.

Upon further review, I also found an article published this week on CNBC.com by Darren Rovell titled, “Paid Tweets are a Gray Area for Athletes and Celebrities“.

[It is a little ironic that Darren wrote an article on paid tweets and his Twitter profile picture includes a Honda logo.  Is he a paid celebrity for Honda or did he just like that picture of himself in front a Honda vehicle enough to select it as a profile photo?]

In the CNBC article, Darren writes about Michael Vick tweeting for McDonalds and mentions a Twitter advertising company called MyLikes.com.  I had never heard of the company, so I decided to check it out.  It turns out that anyone can sign up with MyLikes and begin to monetize their Twitter stream.  After registering for MyLikes, a user is presented with a list of possible tweets (and per click payments) that they can then send out to ‘endorse’ a product or website.

My Paid Tweet Stats from MyLikes.com

To test the service, I actually sent out a couple of tweets from the platform – and earned myself 18 cents for my efforts (but I won’t get paid until I reach a $2 threshold).  I liked that I could actually edit the tweets to modify the tweet to fit my style, and then platform automatically adds a link and “-spon” at the end of the tweet.   The “-spon” is a flag that indicates a sponsored tweet and signals to others that it is a ‘commercial’.

My Experiment With Sponsored Tweets on MyLikes.com

Personally, posting a couple of sponsored tweets feels a little ‘dirty’ and unethical to me.  The little ‘-spon’ added to my tweet could easily be missed and I am sure that many celebrities do not even bother to mention their paid relationship.  Legally, the FTC requires bloggers and tweeters to disclose their connections but the rules governing disclosure are vague and do not appear to be prosecuted.  As a brand, I also think there are far more creative ways to reach customers than using sponsored tweets.

Since I do not actively follow many athletes or celebrities, I appear to be immune to their sponsored tweets and cannot remember even seeing any such tweets.  Or maybe it’s because of the way I use Twitter as a personal bookmark and search engine that I don’t really run across too many ‘spammy’ tweets.  In any case, spamming and advertising on Twitter are here to stay, just like on any other media platform, but I do not think they are effective and my experiment with them is ending.  

So, what do you think about paid and sponsored tweets?

——————————————————————————

I also found the following articles and points of view while writing this post and want to share them as well:

From NPR.org — FTC: Bloggers Must Disclose Paid Endorsements

From Techcrunch.com – Full Disclosure: Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards

From blogger John Bell — Are Paid Tweets Effective?

From BusinessWeek.com — The Art of Advertising on Twitter

Links to my gamification posts can be found below or where they were syndicated on Social Media Today:

• Gamification is Everywhere, But What Is It?
• Adding Gamification to Your Community

More on Leo Sorge can be found from these links:

• Leo Sorge website
• Leo Sorge on Twitter
• Leo Sorge on LinkedIn
• Leo Sorge on Slideshare

And here is Leo’s Thrones of Game presentation:

Thank you Leo for creating and sharing this presentation!

In any case, there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.  In addition, my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.  Otherwise, you could overwhelm your audience or get suboptimal uptake of the new features.

Universe of Game Mechanics – According to a definition in the Gamification Wiki,“Game Mechanics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable gameplay.”  To break the definition into simpler terms, game mechanics let you build features that are fun and addictive.

In my earlier gamification post, I provided a table that compared game mechanics to human desires.  This is just a subset of possible types of game mechanics that could be incorporated into a community or website.

The Gamification Wiki actually lists 24 different game mechanics and SCVNGR identifies 47 unique game mechanics based on an article published on TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld last year.  SCVNGR is a mobile game with real world challenges — and all SCVNGR employees are given the Game Dynamics Playbook and ‘strongly’ encouraged to memorize the deck of game mechanics cards.  SCVNGR’s games and challenges are built using combinations of these game mechanics.  Both of these lists can be used to brainstorm on adding new features and elements to any website or community.

Community Audience Questions – Before you can add gamification to your community, you need to really understand your community.  Here are some probing questions that need to be answered before adding any new gamification features to a community:

Do you have an open or closed community?  Is your community a professional, social, support, informational, hybrid or something else community?  How do you want members to use the community?  How many members do you have and how many do you add in a typical week or month?  What is the typical member profile?  How engaged are your community members?  How do you measure engagement?  What motivates your members to join, participate and stay engaged in the community?  Do you have robust member profiles?  Are member profiles searchable?  Can members ‘friend’ or message other members?  Do you have a way for members to add their Twitter or Facebook accounts to their profiles?  How  easy is it for members to share content on other sites?

Community Goals — Likewise, you also want to make sure that the goals for your community are well understood and syndicated across your organization:

What goals are you trying to accomplish with the community?  Can you measure them?  Do you have any elements of gamification incorporated into your community today? Does your community platform support gamification elements?  Can you track your measures in your community system?

Measures of Engagement for a Community – There are 5 generally-accepted measures of engagement for a community:

1. Recency — when was the last visit?
2. Frequency — how often does the member visit?
3. Duration — how long do members stay on the sight when they visit?
4. Virality — how often do members share content on the site?  and how much is their sharing amplified through their network?
5. Ratings — how often do members rate content on the site?

The Gamification Backlash – Two Long Term Business Strategies by Michael Wu, Chief Analytical Scientist for Lithium

Gamification Research Network - The Gamification Research Network (GRN) is a communication hub for academic and industry researchers and students interested in studying the use of game elements in non-game contexts. The purpose of the GRN is to further research in the area by providing a repository of relevant people, projects, and publications, and by offering a shared space of discussion and publication.

Gamasutra – The art and business of making games

Semantic Foundry Survey of Gamification and Behaviorial Economics Resources

According to Wikipedia, “gamification is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage users.”  Gamification expert Gabe Zichermann says that “gamification is the new loyalty”.  And at the 2011 Games for Change Festival, former Vice President Al Gore said that “games are the new normal”.

The term and use of gamification has literally exploded in the last 15 months.  Before August 2010, the term rarely appeared in the Google search timeline.  Starting in January 2011, it’s popularity has remained very high including 2 big spikes in January and August.

Google Search Timeline for "Gamification"

At the Gamification Summit, research data from M2 Research was discussed that pegs the current gamification market at $100 million – and the market is estimated to grow to $2.8 billion by 2016.  That is why gamification is on the front burner for many organizations and money is flowing into gamification initiatives and projects.

Even without actively playing games, many of the more popular websites and destinations today are already gamified.  And most of us are participating in or paying attention to these public displays of loyalty and success.  For example, Twitter publicly displays the number of tweets, followers and following for each Twitter user.  Personally, I tend to disregard any Twitter user who has less than 500 tweets or followers and use that as my ‘minimum’ for determining if someone is worthy of my trust or who does not get what Twitter is all about.

Tom Humbarger Twitter Stats As Of 10/18/2011

Other public displays of loyalty occur in Facebook which shows the number of likes or fans that a company or brand website has received, and also adds an item in a user’s news stream when they like or follow a company.  Many blogs or newsites display the number of views and shares for each piece of content which helps users to see how popular something is and whether it is worth reading.

Social Media Today Post Stats Shows # of Reads and Shares

Other sites are all about competing with your friends and when you join those sites, you explicitly participate in their game.  Foursquare tracks the number of places I have checked into and displays which badges I have earned.  Every time I check into a venue on Foursquare, a notification is sent to both my Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as to all of my Foursquare friends.  Foursquare also has a leaderboard that tracks my weekly progress against my friends’ progress.

Tom Humbarger Stats on Foursquare

So, why do people play games?  Bunchball, one of the new leaders in the gamification space, pulled together the following graphic in their Gamification 101 whitepaper .  This simple table matches up game mechanics (points, levels, challenges, etc.) with human desires for game play.  Each of the mechanics match a primary human desire, but most of the mechanics also impact other areas of human desire.

Building Blocks of Gamification from Bunchball

In the following video (45 minutes in total, but well worth it), Gabe Zichermann of Gamification Co discusses the history of loyalty systems and how game theory needs to be incorporated into websites to motivate customer engagement and loyalty.

Gabe’s key points include:

• movitation drives engagement
• 5 measures of engagement – recency, frequency, duration, virality, ratings
• fun sells
• loyalty used to be private, but in a virtual economy loyalty decisions are public
• game designers have figured out what motivates players
• Richard Bartles studied MUD player types in the late 1990′s and came up with 4 types of players: killers, achievers, socializers and explorers which demonstrates the need to know your audience
• the flow zone is the state between anxiety and boredom
• games cannot be ‘too easy’ as they need friction to be fun
• people want status, access, power and/or free stuff
• status, access and power should be preferred by marketers as it is difficult to value virtual rewards
• serendepity is bad, design is good

Stephen Anderson gave the presentation at SxSW this Spring titled “Long after the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users”.  Stephen’s presentation discusses how to get users to stay in love with software applications by making them more gamelike.

And in another recent presentation, Margaret Wallace, CEO of Playmatics, talks about how gamification is changing the world.

In any case, gamification is here to stay.  Anyone less than 40 has grown up playing video games and have become accustomed to “gamelike” interactions.  And as the number of marketing messages continue to inundate the typical customer, using gamification to engage customers and build loyalty will separate the winning companies from the also-rans over the next few years.

To learn more about gamification, here are some additional resources on the topic:

• Gamification Wiki - http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification
• Gamification Blog - http://gamification.co/
• Digest of Gamification - http://www.gamifiedloyalty.com/
• Gamification Research Network - http://gamification-research.org/
• Gamification 101 - http://www.bigdoor.com/gamification-101/
• Gamification in real time from Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/search/gamification

The study is available from the IBM CMO Study website which also includes links to other resources including two webinars that discuss the results of the study and an Executive Summary.  One of the webinars will be held on Friday, October 14th at 9am Eastern and will be hosted by both Harvard Business Review and IBM.  In addition, IBM has created a sub-group on LinkedIn to discuss the study in more depth.

One of the first graphics in the Study shows that CMOs are underprepared to manage the impact of key changes in the marketing arena.

Based on the areas where CMOs are underprepared below, it would appear that CMOs have not kept up with changes in the marketing environment.  Many of these changes occurred during the last 3 to 5 years when most CMOs had already moved away from day-to-day operations into management of the marketing function.  But many of these changes have been driven from the ‘bottom’ which means that these CMOs do not have hands-on experience with most of the these functions – especially the top 4 of data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices and shifting consumer demographics.

The 3 strategic insights from the study are that CMO’s need to help their organizations:

• Deliver value to empowered customers
• Foster lasting connections
• Capture value and measure results

Delivering value to empowered customers means finding out who the customers are, what they want and how they want to interact with the organization.  Customers have so many interaction choices and not all of them can be treated in the aggregate as marketers have done in the past.

Foster lasting connections is all about enhancing customer loyalty and encouraging satisfied customers to ‘share’ the marketing effort by becoming active advocates for the brand, product or company.  The companies that figure this out first will have a huge advantage as disaffected customers have many options today and are very quick to publicly share both positive and negative opinions to their socially networked connections.

Capturing value and measuring results should be at the top of all CMOs lists.  In the past, marketing professionals have gotten a bit lazy when it comes to quantifying the return or ROI of their marketing investments.  In the new marketing order, they will have to apply financial discipline to all of their programs.

The Executive Summary also offered some targeted actions to address them:

Summary From IBM CMO Study - Executive Summary

The full CMO study is available below or you can check out the ibm.com/cmostudy website.

There are also a number of videos about the Study posted by IBM on YouTube, including this one:

I was trying to find a blog post I wrote about community management 2 years ago, and realized that I really had to search to find it. So, I decided to write a blog post that consolidated my best blog posts on this topic to make it easier for me (and my fans) to find these posts.

Adding Gamification to Your Community

This post discusses how to apply gamification and game mechanics to a community site.  It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.  I am more than willing to jump on the gamification bandwagon if it helps push the boundaries for other marketers and community managers.

The Importance of Active Community Management – Proved With Real Data

This post is probably my most popular community blog post and it proves what happens when a community goes from active to passive (or no) management. Using real before and after statistics from the Catalyze community, the statistics are a compelling look at why active community management is so important.

Community Managers and Quarterbacks

In this post, I compare the importance of quarterbacks to a winning football team to the importance of an A+ community manager to a successful community – and ends with the question of “So are you willing to accept mediocrity for your community manager?”

Looking for An Example Community RFP?

In the spirit of social media transparency, I have attached an example of the actual RFP that I used 2 years when I started the community process to develop what eventually became the Catalyze community. One of the vendors who responded to our proposal noted that it was one of the most complete and comprehensive proposals that they had seen.

I made a couple of slight updates to the the RFP, but for the most part I would use this same RFP if I were looking for a vendor today. Feel free to use the example as a template or to give you some ideas for your own request for proposal. I have left blanks where there was proprietary information, but for the most part the template is generic.

Four Community Ideals

I was asked to participate in an interesting collaborative project called the Project 100 which was started by consumer marketer Jeff Caswell.

My four community ideals include:

1. Be transparent
2. Be personal
3. Be compelling
4. Be omnipresent

So, What Do Community Managers Make?

I participated in the Forum One Online Community Compensation Survey in July2008 and wrote this post with the results. While the post is more than 3 years old, the content and insights are still relevant today.

My Social Media Job Description

This is a follow-on blog post that is my most popular post and it provides what would be my ideal social media position. I think the responsibilities should be stated in fairly broad terms without getting into specific tools or techniques. I also don’t like job descriptions that specify a number of years of experience. Instead, a social media expert should be able to point to his body of work – through his blog, his Twitter feed, his LinkedIn profile or Facebook page – and that should be sufficient proof. Finally, a list of key attributes is essential to get an understanding of the candidate’s personality.

While this post does not relate specifically to community management, the person you want to fill your community manager position should have these same characteristics.

The Importance of Regular Community Communication

One of the most important tasks that a community manager needs to do is to regularly communicate with his members. When I was managing the Catalyze community, I accomplished this by sending out an email newsletter every 2 to 3 weeks.  The frequent contact is important from many different angles.  It keeps the community in the front of each member’s mind and reminds them that there is value in the community.

What Are the Characteristics of a Great Community Manager

This post summarized a live chat hosted by The Community Roundtable and introNetworks from August 2009 and included these panelists:

• Jim Storer (@jimstorer) from The Community Roundtable
• Rachel Happe (@rhappe) from The Community Roundtable
• Howard Wahlberg (@howardw) Member Services Director for the National Science Teachers Association
• Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) Director of Community for Radian6
• Mark Sylvester (@marksylvester) CEO of introNetworks