For instance our industry’s association Bitkom found out that 47 percent of the 3,6 Mio businesses in Germany uses Facebook, Twitter, or Blogs. “This number at first sight doesn’t look bad”, net economist Holger Schmidt writes. “How little serious businesses take social media can be seen in staff numbers”. Another result of the survey is that 80 percent of the businesses leave their social media management to only one or two employees.

Social Media Campaign - The Big Idea

Graphic “Social Media Campaign – The Big Idea”

“Especially low the staff numbers are in manufacturing sector, while relatively moderate in the service industry”, Schmidt writes. What is missing most is a clear-cut organizational structure and the lack of any goals or rather Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI’s). “Two thirds of those questioned didn’t delineate definite goals of what should be achieved. Even in harsh antagonism to the means applied, the expectancies are high: Almost 90 percent of enterprises assume increasing relevance of social media.”

Especially the lack of KPI’s might constitute a serious problem soon, as only distinct indicators measuring and analyzing success and impact of social media campaigns, allow to seriously calculate the Return on Investment (ROI). Indispensable to it logically is a solid social media monitoring evaluating the respective KPI’s (gridmaster KPI Dashboard).

The current inquiry “Turning Buzz into Gold” by business consultancy McKinsey & Company details out, how big the need to catch up in the German economy is. Only 37 percent of the businesses communication via Facbook, Twitter, and blogs defined KPI’s for their social media usage. A mere 20 percent measure the ROI.

The hopes lying on social media, nevertheless, are very high. 71 percent of the 200 businesses that have been asked in the survey speculate on a “significant profit potential”.

However, most companies remain realistic in terms of their status que. E.g. only 10 percent of the German businesses believe they can increase their results with their actual social media activities.

The solution: Companies have to invest in manpower and monitoring. Only this way the particular activities can be improved and their success measured.

Vancouver-based Mentionmapp does one thing alone: It designs a graphic out of the tweets, replys, and retweets of a twitter profile. This way a visual overview of your personal micro-blogging communication is generated. Well done: When clicking on another twitter-user in your map, his 140 character communication is shown.

Mentionmapp

Contrary to many similar offerings not only your own personal twitter account can be analyzed and picturized, Mentionmapp also draws each different twitter account you wish. Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, you just need to type their twitter account into the search field, and the tool draws their twitter maps. This function can be quite useful to monitoring professionals, who want to get a glimpse on their competitors.

Mentionmapp still is in Beta status, but a demanded business for long. It already has been acquired by OverInteractive Media Inc. The Vision of the Canadians:  „Take information beyond columns and rows, graphs and charts and create engaging interactive data stories.“

When they succeed in living up to their vision, we can look forward to many more great tools!

The most exciting tool amplifying Pinterest is PinReach. The new service measures the reach a member of the hyped network attains. The US-Americans developed the PinReach Score depicting the latter.

PinReach doesn’t reveal how this score is evaluated, though. Nevertheless they explain that, for instance, repins are more important than own pins. “Once members start repinning your item your score will increase much quicker. Another similar relationship exists between followers and who you follow. Simply following 500 members will do far less for your score than having 500 new followers on your account“, an illuminating text states.

PinReach of Christine Martinez

The tool integrates the amount of pins, repins, likes, followers, followings, comments and boards in one piece. Extra graphics are analyzing the pin-history on top of it and identifies the most popular boards.

Never mind the statistics and analyses, the experts of PinReach are aware that Pinterest is all about easy stuff: „Ultimately, the goal should be to produce and share great content on Pinterest.“

What he means by Digital Darwinism is the excluding competition around awareness which brands in the social web are facing. Now all of a sudden extremely hungry and customer focused newcomers compete with established brands that long profited of their tradition, reputation and their rather sedate product cycles. Now the latter notice that the former are growing excessively, and are only one click away of heralding their decline.

An important factor is the new power of the consumers – so to speak the right to communicate and co-determine that is being lived on social media platforms for long.

In Solis’ point of view on Facebook & Co. an excluding competition is fought that only those companies will survive that are willed to accept this change and think differently. To consist in this competition there are 10 principles to abide by that he had articulated. Among them there is strategy, culture, people, and vision. In respect of the last point Brian asks rightly, when one has read the mission statement of his company lately? Whether you live by them and whether they are matching the times. Basically he says that an enterprise has to be able to create a working environment that leaves each employee the room to invest his entire creativity and innovation.

A business that strives to maintain in the Digital Darwinism, always has to question itself, and has to be ready to adapt their business goals and strategies anytime. Further keywords that are of huge importance to Brian Solis are: Localization, Philanthropic Capitalism, and Intelligence. On it is is said:

„One of the biggest trends in 2011 was the development of social media command centers. At the heart of these sophisticated data gathering silos were conversations and tools that allowed community managers to listen, respond, and promote engagement within the company. While social media is introducing the art & science of monitoring to marketing and service teams it is the organizations that invest in technology, teams and processes that will translate activity into actionable insights.“

However, the most exciting thought of Brian Solis is to demand more leadership qualities by the Top-Management. They have to provide the strategy and exemplify them through their own life. They have to cater the adequate corporate culture, and should be the first to listen to users and consumers in social media.

Source: eMarketer

The US-American reaffirms a trend we have covered only recently. According to a study by Brandfog, the social media awareness of a brand is influenced positively by the circumstance whether the CEO engages on Twitter, Facebook, and Co. personally. For instance 78% think, it has positive consequences when the boss hits the keyboard or smartphone on his own. 71% believe this improves the brand image and 64% are sure a twittering and facebooking management’s business is perceived as more transparent than others.

Brian’s approach is extremely fascinating to me, so I want to dig deeper into it in further blog articles. Though, it has to be admitted that these principles apply foremost to consumer-centered business models.

Source: EMarketer

Once being asked after it, 82% answered that it is “important” or even “very important” when the CEO engages in social media. A particularly astonishing result of the study furthermore is that a CEO, who is representing the interests of his enterprise on Twitter or Facebook, increases the trust of his employees in the respective business.  At least that is the persuasion of 82%.

Nevertheless it is of major difference, whether the boss twitters, comments, and posts personally or has entrusted it to an external agency. At least a current Swiss study by Zurich-based Bernet PR proves once again that authenticity generally is one of the most important currencies in the social web. “This only works with the personal voice”, Micheal Walther writes. “It is possible to depute concepts, strategies, and programming, on your own you should speak.” In the beginning it would suffice, if a spokesperson or a close colleague would do the talk.

German chancellor Angela Merkel and her spokesman Steffen Seibert constitute a good example. Since the former ZDF journalist twitters, she is – at least perceived – closer to the citizen.

In the end – at least in businesses – it always is about sales and profit. Here, again, a CEO can assert improvements. The study by Brandfog concludes that around 77% of the questioned buy a brand’s or business’ commodities, whose marketing team engages in conversations with the consumers about their own products.

Having read these results, we ask ourselves: Which CEO of a enterprise twitters personally? Not many, that’s for sure! Although it is apparent which huge potential almost all businesses leave untouched.

>>CEOs and Top Executives on Twitter:

Ranking Tech Companies Executives on Twitter by Robert Scoble

Atkinson Public Relations – list of top executives using Twitter

Pinterest, Glancee, or BranchOut: Why Facebook is its own internet for long

In spite of all discussions about the new timeline, or the question which brand has most fans, it has been lost sight of Facebook’s continuation of exactly this project. Or rather: how it lets others continue it. Indeed in the past months a multiplicity of new web and mobile applications emerged that turn personal data of Facebook into a decisive part of their own network. That’s how Facebook is becoming the foundation of a whole new generation of fresh social networks and offerings.

Pinterest, Glancee, or BranchOut: Why Facebook is its own internet for long

The two most popular ones surely are Pinterest and Spotify. But there are further thrilling networks: For instance the business networks BranchOut and Identified. “Identified already has 2.9 Mio monthly users, according to numbers by AppData, BranchOut even 11.2 Mio – to be on a par with Xing”, Basic Thinking has investigated. “Both Apps give something to Facebook users that the social network has missed out on: a formal career network besides the fun.”

Pinterest, Glancee, or BranchOut: Why Facebook is its own internet for long

Applications like Highlight and Glancee, for their part, offer a lot of fun. To Marcel Weiss they are “a perfect example of which new things become possible at the intersection of mobile and social web”.

Highlight and Glancee, in his opinion, distinguish themselves “by not only taking the relations of Facebook and tell who of their friends or of their friend’s friends is near (which is how Sonar.me works). They also use the data of their ‘likes’ to point to individuals sharing their interests.”

Pinterest, Glancee, or BranchOut: Why Facebook is its own internet for long

From a social media intelligence point of view these offerings are an incredibly fascinating field, as they access a multitude of data that the Facebook-API supplies. This demonstrates the value of the user information the US-network provides.

In our Blog we already covered Pinterest, which wasn’t included in Version 3.0 yet. The image sharing platform was the fastest standalone network to reach to 10 Mio users globally. At the end of February it had 17.8 Mio users worldwide, while in Germany it has 1.4 Mio.

Our Top 20 social media sites featured social media sites that increased in importance since our Version 3.0 of the Social Media Prism Germany. Among them DailyMotion, Orkut, and Photobucket are to be found. They had to be included in Version 4.0 of the German Social Media Prism.

Here you can download Version 4.0 of the Social Media Prism Germany. Share it with your friends and feel free to comment below.

German Social Media Prism 4.0

For instance a recent research by Iron Mountain concludes that most European businesses yet don’t know how to handle data of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. “Indeed 94% of the questioned German companies (Europe: 86%) are aware to file communication in the social media channels as a formal business process” the paper states, but “at the same time 72% of the German businesses (Europe: 63%) don’t consider themselves as capable to capture the shared data and information of social networks accordingly”.

In fact tools and solutions that measure the ROI of almost all social media campaigns exist for long. Our gridmaster is an example to mention here.

Offers like ours and those of other monitoring tools satisfy an ever growing need. Google wants to have their share of the market and consequently drill with Google Analytics. Soon it is supposed to measure ROI, only on least significant sources like Blogger.com, however. It cannot perform a deeper analysis of top players like Facebook or Twitter yet.

“Google Analytics claims to close the gap between social media and hard business KPI’s”, t3n writes. “It shall be accomplished by not only measuring the traffic that arrives via different social media channels, but also tracking it further.” That’s how direct inferences onto conversion rates become possible.

Google inferences to social value

Number of visitors in the Social Web

Though, the ROI is only one side of the coin, the other are Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). They cannot be neglected in relevant and traceable measurements of success of social media campaigns. If you want to quantify the latter, Google Analytics doesn’t help you yet. Then you better turn to established monitoring tools, like our gridmaster for instance. They can assess buzz, demography, sentiments and semantic data on top of it. Only they enable you to place activities sustainable and targeted. Considered globally it’s all about the increase of brand awareness, sales, profit, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Still countless businesses evaluate the success of their social media campaigns with the mere mass of the three f’s: Friends, Followers, and Fans. Whether on Facebook or Twitter – the bare amount of them doesn’t indicate their interaction rate.

The new Google tool apparently can’t handle the Standard KPI’s. I.e the new tool only touches the surface of social media data. As easy to navigate Google Analytics may be, it can’t replace a complex professional tool. Indeed, the new service of the web company can possibly give the lots of rudimentary monitoring offerings lacking depth a hard time.

The dpa – Germany’s biggest press agency – initially looked at the judicial challenges of pinterest. “Most German jurists conclude that Pinterest violates the copyright” the agency quotes lawyer Carsten Ulbricht. Though, he doesn’t see a wave of dissuasions rolling. Especially as the principle “Nullo actore, nullus iudex” applies. Where there is no claimant, there is no judge.

Irrespective of these concerns the web pin board is a true social media phenomenon. In no time the image pin board turned hot topic in the web 2.0 world. The least know exactly what they talk about, though. That’s why we offer the 3^rd part of the Pinterest story (in German: 1st part, 2nd part) with further facts about the usage and demography.

• The image site attracted 17.8 Mio users in the USA according to Focus Online, which signifies an increase of the factor 44 since May ‘11
• According to a study by Shareaholic, Pinterest generates more referral traffic than twitter or Google+
• The boom could pay off soon: apparently venture capitalists are willing to invest at  US $ 1 billion+ rating

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Twitter

Every company that takes care of their image and web awareness is using social media monitoring tools like the gridmaster for long in order to be sensitive of their actual online reputation and to be able to identify those issues that could worsen it. Microsoft, in collaboration with the American Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, published an interesting study to this topic.

Twitter study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University

The scientists and the software architect examined which factors determine the credibility of a tweet or its twitterer. Briefly: the determining factors are the profile picture, the follower, and the quantity of orthographic and grammatical mistakes.

In respect of the profile picture those users are trusted the least that use the standard twitter-egg. Following this are pictures of avatars or cartoons. Ranking on top regarding the credibility are twitterers who use photos showing themselves. “Concerning the name, users trust those twitterers most with a topic-related name, ordinary names coming next, and the least trust is put into users having internet fantasy names”, WirtschaftsWoche summarizes a further result of the study.

Additionally, the amount of followers is important. Twitterers following more accounts than they are followed by are seen as less trustful. This is seen as a hint on artificial reputation building on twitter.

It is important for your own authenticity and the standing in the community that you only retweet at best persons you know or are sure to trust.

Very interesting: “84% of twitter users direct their attention to posts via the twitter search and the same number via by twitter recommended topics. Another 72% by Google and 82% by general web searches” WirtschaftsWoche writes. I.e: In fact most twitter users do not only read the statuses on their twitter own stream.

Who wants to raise his number of followers should therefore engage in twittering all trending topics.