MarTech Plot Lines for 2021

“Apophenia” – seeing patterns where none exist – is both occupational hazard and job requirement for an industry analyst. The CDP Institute Daily Newsletter provides a steady supply of grist for my pattern detection mill. But the selection of items for that newsletter isn’t random. I have a list of long-running stories that I follow, and keep an eye out for items that illuminate them. I’ll share some of those below.

Feel free to play along at home and let me know what stories you see developing. Deep State conspiracy theories are out of bounds but you’re welcome to speculate on the actual author(s) of the works attributed to “Scott Brinker”. 

Media

Everyone knows the pandemic accelerated the shift towards online media that was already under way. A few points that haven’t been made quite so often include:

- connected TVs and other devices allow individual-level targeting without use of third-party cookies. As online advertising is increasingly delivered through those channels,  the death of cookies becomes less important. Nearly all device-level targeting can also include location data, adding a dimension that cookies often lack.

- walled gardens (Facebook, Google, Amazon) face increasing competition from walled flower pots – that is, businesses with less data but a similar approach. Retailers like Walmart, Kroger, Target, and CVS have all started their own ad networks, drawing on their own customer data. Traditional publishers like Meredith have collected their formerly-scattered customer data to enable cross-channel, individual-level targeting.  Compilers like Neustar and Merkle are also entering the business. None of these has the data depth or scale of Facebook, Google, or Amazon but their audiences are big enough to be interesting. The various “universal ID” efforts being pursued by the ad industry will enable the different flow pots to cross-pollinate, creating larger audiences that I’ll call walled flower beds unless someone stops me.

- shoppable video is growing rapidly. Amazon seems unstoppable but it faces increasing competition from social networks, streaming TV, and every other digital channel that can let viewers make purchases related to what they’re watching. The numbers are still relatively small but the potential is huge. And note that this is a way to sell based purely on context, so targeting doesn’t have to be based on individual identities. That will become more important as privacy regulations become more effective at shutting off the flow of third-party personal data.

- digital out-of-home ads will combine with augmented and virtual reality to create a fundamentally new medium. The growth of digital out of home advertising is worth watching just because DOOH is such a great acronym  . But it’s also a huge story that doesn’t currently get much attention and will explode once people can travel more freely post-pandemic. Augmented and virtual reality are making great technical strides (how about an AR contact lens?) but so far seem like very niche marketing tools. However, the two technologies perfectly complement each other, and will be supercharged by more accessible location data. Watch this space.

Marketing Technology

- data will become more accessible. That marketers want to be “data-driven” is old news. What’s changing is that years of struggle are finally yielding progress toward making data more available and providing the tools to use it. As with digital advertising, the pandemic has accelerated an existing trend, achieving in months digital transformations that would otherwise have taken years.  Although internal data is the focus of most integration efforts, access to external data is also growing, privacy rules notwithstanding. Intent data has been a particular focus with recent announcements from TechTarget, ZoomInfo, Spiceworks Ziff Davis, and Zeta Global.

- artificial intelligence will become (even more) ubiquitous. It seems just yesterday that we were impressed to hear that a company’s product was “AI-powered”. Today, that’s as exciting as being told their offices have “electric lights”. But AI continues to grow stronger even if it doesn’t get as much attention (which the truly paranoid will suspect is because the AIs prefer it that way). Marketers increasingly worry that AI will ultimately replace them, even if it makes more productive before that happens. The headline story is that AI is taking on more “creative” tasks such as content creation and campaign design, which were once thought beyond its capabilities. But the real reason for its growth may be that interactions are shifting to digital channels where success will be based more on relentless analytics than an occasional flash of uniquely human insight.

- blockchain will quiet down. I’ll list blockchain only to point out that’s been an underachiever in the hype-generation department. Back in 2018 we saw it at least as often as AI. Now it comes up just rarely.  There are many clear applications in logistics and some promising proposals related to privacy. But there’s less wild-eyed talk about blockchain changing the world. Do keep an ear open, though: I suspect more is happening behind the scenes than we know.

- no-code will continue to grow. If anything has replaced AI as the buzzword of the year, it’s “no code” and related concepts like “self-service” and “citizen [whatever]”. It’s easy to make fun of these (“citizen brain surgeon”, anyone?) but there’s no doubt that many workers become more productive when they can automate processes without relying on IT professionals. The downside is the same loss of quality control and integration posed other types of shadow IT – although no-code systems are more often governed than true shadow IT projects.  In addition, no-code’s more sophisticated cousin, low-code, is widely used by IT professionals.  It’s possible to see no-code systems as an alternative to AI: both improve productivity, one by letting workers do more and other by replacing them altogether. But a more realistic view is to recognize AI as a key enabling technology inside many no-code systems. As the internal AIs get smarter, no-code will take on increasingly complex tasks, making it more helpful (and more threatening) to increasingly skilled workers.

Marketing

The pandemic has changed how marketers (and everyone else) do their work. With vaccines now reaching the public, it’s important to realize that conditions will change again fairly soon. But that doesn’t mean things will go back to how they were.

- events have changed forever. Yes, in-person events will return and many of us will welcome them with new appreciation for what we’ve missed. But tremendous innovation has occurred in on-line events and more will surely appear in coming months. It’s obvious that there will be a permanent shift towards more digital events, with in-person events reserved for situations where they offer a unique advantage. We can also expect in-person events to incorporate innovations developed for digital events – such as enhanced networking techniques and interactive presentations. I don’t think the significance of this has been fully recognized.  Bear in mind that live events are often the most important new business source for B2B marketers, so major changes in how they work will ramify throughout the marketing and sales process.

- remote work is here to stay. Like events, marketers’ worksites will drift away from the current nearly-all-digital mode to a mix of online and office-based activities. Also like events, innovations developed for remote work, such as improved collaboration tools, will be deployed in both situations. The key difference is that attendance of most events is optional, so attendees can walk away from dysfunctional changes. Workers have less choice about their environments, so harmful innovations such as employee surveillance and off-hours interruptions are harder for them to reject. Whether these stressors outweigh the benefits of remote work will depend on how well companies manage them, so we can expect a period of experimentation and turmoil as businesses learn what works best. With luck, this will mean new attention to workplace policies and management practices, something many firms have handled poorly in the past. Companies that excel at managing remote workers will have a new competitive advantage, especially since remote work lets the best workers choose from a wider variety of employers.

- privacy pressures will rise. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) wasn’t the first serious privacy rule or the only reason that privacy gained more attention. But its enforcement date of May 25, 2018 does mark the start of an escalating set of changes that impact what data is available to marketers and how consumers view use of their personal information. These changes will continue and companies will find it increasingly important to manage consumer data in ways that comply with ever-more-demanding regulations and give consumers confidence that their data is being handled appropriately. (A closely related subplot is continued security breaches as companies fail to secure their data despite best efforts.  Another is the continued misbehavior of Facebook and other social media firms and increasing resistance by regulators and consumers.  That one is worth a channel of its own.)  Marketers will need to take a more active role in privacy discussions, which have been dominated by legal, security, and IT staffs in businesses, and by consumer advocates, academics, and regulators in the political world. Earning a seat at that crowded table won’t be easy but making their voice heard is essential if marketers want the rules to reflect their needs.

- trust is under fire. This is a broad trend spanning continents and stretching back for years (see Martin Gurri’s uncannily prescient The Revolt of the Public, published in 2014),  Socially, the trend presents itself as a loss of trust in institutions, the benefits of technology, and credentialed experts in general. In marketing, it shows up as companies voicing disappointment with data-driven analytics and personalization, as consumers not trusting companies to manage or protect their data, as workers' fear that AI systems will harm creativity and codify unfair bias, as widely-noted gaps between what customers want and companies deliver, as “citizen developers” preferring to build their own systems, and as buyers preferring peers, Web searches, social media, and pretty much any other information source to analysts reports.  

Trust is the theme that connects all the stories I’ve listed above.  Without trust, consumers won’t share their data, respond to marketing messages, or try new channels; governments will push for more stringent privacy and business regulations; workers will be less productive; and all industry progress will move more slowly. The trust crisis is too broad for marketers fix by themselves. But they need to account for it in everything they do, adjusting their plans to include trust-building measures that might not have been needed in a healthier past.  The pandemic will end soon and technologies come and go.  But trust will be a story to follow for a long, long time.

BadTech Is the Next New Thing

Forget about Martech, Adtech, or even Madtech. The next big thing is BadTech.

I’m referring to is the backlash against big tech firms – Google, Amazon, Apple, and above all Facebook – that have relentlessly expanded their influence on everyday life. Until recently, these firms were mostly seen as positive, or at least benignly neutral, forces that made consumers’ lives easier.  But something snapped after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last March.  Scattered concerns became a flood of hostility.  Enthusiasm curdled into skepticism and fear.  The world recognized a new avatar of evil: BadTech.

As a long-standing skeptic (see this from 2016), I’m generally pleased with this development. The past month alone offers plenty of news to alarm consumers:

• Google tracks location even after users turn off Location Sharing.
• telecom lobbyists have successfully blocked close to 70 privacy bills so far this year.
• big gaps in social media efforts to block even someone as clearly horrid as Infowars’ Alex Jones – famous for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
• Facebook reinstated social monitoring vendor Crimson Hexagon despite concerns that government agencies were using it to monitor public activities.
• Amazon’s facial recognition software falsely matched 28 U.S. Congress members with mugshots.
• Artifical intelligence training data often creates unintentional bias and there's no standard method to prevent this.
• Russian hackers continue to attack U.S. (and other) elections.

There's more bad news for marketers and other business people:

• clients' customer data was exposed by Salesforce.com (although there’s no evidence that anything was actually leaked).
• up to 70% of video spend goes to unauthorized sellers.
• fake followers comprise up to one-third of Instagram influencers’ audiences.
• few organizations are succeeding in their AI investments.

Not surprisingly, consumers, businesses, and governments have reacted with new skepticism, concern, and even some action:

• Americans fear losing their personal data more than losing their physical wallet
• only Amazon ranks in the top five of the 20 most trusted companies.  Google, Apple and Microsoft are six, eight, and nine.  Facebook isn’t anywhere on the list.
• European Union puts teeth in regulations that require removal of extremist content within one hour.
• California legislature passes strong data privacy law.
• advertisers infatuation with blockchain is starting to fizzle.

But all is not perfect.

• BadTech firms still plunge ahead with dangerous projects. For example, despite the clear and increasing dangers from poorly controlled AI, it’s being distributed more broadly by Ebay, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle. 
• Other institutions merrily pursue their own questionable ideas. Here we have General Motors and Shell opening new risks by connecting cars to gas pumps.  Here – this is not a joke – a university is putting school-controlled Amazon Echo listening devices in every dorm room

• The press continues to get it wrong. This New York Times Magazine piece presents California’s privacy law as a triumph for its citizen-activist sponsor, when he in fact traded a nearly-impossible-to change referendum for a law that will surely be gutted before it takes effect in 2020.

• Proponents will overreach. This opinion piece argues the term “privacy policy” should be banned because consumers think the label means a company keeps their data private. This is a side issue at best; at worst, it tries to protect people from being lazy. Balancing privacy against other legitimate concerns will be hard enough without silly distractions.

So welcome to our latest brave new world, where BadTech is one more villain to fear   It's progress that people recognize the issues but we can't let emotion overwhelm considered solutions.  Let’s use the moment to address the real problems without creating new ones or throwing away what’s genuinely good.  We can't afford to fail.

Genoo and Act-On Software Add Social Marketing Features

Summary: Two low-cost demand generation systems, Genoo and Act-On Software, have added unusually advanced social marketing features.

A few weeks back, I wrote about social marketing features from consumer marketing automation vendors. Naturally our friends in the business marketing space have been adding such features as well. I got details from two of them last week.

- Genoo, which offers a solid demand generation system for a rock-bottom $199/month, has placed a particular focus on capturing contact information from social interactions. People who comment on a Genoo-hosted Web page or subscribe to a Genoo-originated RSS feed can be loaded into the system as contacts and these activities can factor into their lead score. I don’t recall seeing either feature in any other demand generation system, although I haven't checked carefully.

Genoo also offers “share to social” badges for messages delivered by its system. These embed a unique ID to link any resulting Web visits back to the original sharer. This feature is not unique – Genius.com and smartFocus do something similar – but it’s still pretty unusual. However, the value is so obvious that I expect many other vendors will soon follow. Genoo can also assign lead score points for social media sharing.

I expect to post a more comprehensive review of Genoo in the next week or two.

- Act-On Software is another low-cost system, starting at $500 per month. It has made several important enhancements since my review in March 2009, notably multi-step campaign sequences and bi-directional integration with Salesforce.com.

To the current topic, it has also added a “Twitter Prospector” to reduce the labor required to mine Twitter for leads. This lets users define multiple search queries and see each result in separate columns. To screen out marketing pitches, the system can exclude tweets with embedded links. Users can reply to selected tweets through corporate accounts, drawing on a library of standard messages. This reduces the risk of inappropriate replies. Users can also forward a tweet to someone else for review or comment.

Act-On will also string together related tweets to give a sense of the on-going dialog. Web site visits driven from Twitter are flagged in the activity history of individual leads and in general Web analytics reports, although Act-On does not tie them to the originator like Genoo. It does add the Twitter ID of known visitors to their lead profile when possible.

Providing a library of standard replies to Twitter messages is not unique (see my December 2009 review of Spredfast for something similar). But it’s an unusual feature for a demand generation system, which typically defers to CRM for managing interactions with individuals. Act-On originally developed the feature for its own use, so perhaps there's no deep significance to its choice. It's also worth considering that the next logical step -- fully automated replies to social messages -- would almost surely fall within the normal scope of marketing and demand generation. (I'm not sure automated responses are such a great idea, but they will ultimately be the only way to manage the volume of messages presented in social media. So it's more a question of how to do them effectively than whether to do them at all.) What we see here is still more blurring of the boundaries between the demand generation and CRM systems, a trend I fully expect to continue.

Matching Social Media to Your Needs and Resources

Summary: Marketers face so many choices that just deciding what to test is a major challenge in itself. Here are some ways to match social media to your business objectives and resources.

I’ll be giving a Webinar on March 23 (register here) with Neolane about cross channel marketing. At least that’s the official topic. In my mind, it’s really about helping marketers choose among the ever-increasing media options available today and in the future.

I won’t go into the details of the presentation, but thought I’d share this chart for selecting among social media.

The chart makes two major points:

- different social media meet different business objectives. I suppose this is self-evident, but it still helps to think about this systematically when you’re trying to decide which to explore. As the chart indicates, most social media can in fact serve more than one objective. Incidentally, the chart lists the objectives in roughly the sequence of the customer life cycle, starting with market preparation activities at the left and moving through purchase and post-purchase support, which further helps you visualize where a particular project fits into your larger customer treatment strategy. You may disagree with particular details on this chart, but that’s less the point than thinking about putting each medium into a larger context.

- media must be matched to your resources. This is also pretty obvious, but, again, it’s easy to ignore it when considering your options. It's also worth pointing out that resources include more than data, technology and experience. My list also includes public interest in your topic and media reach (i.e., your firm’s ability to attract attention to its program, largely by paid advertising). Both make possible social programs that would otherwise fail because no one would participate. It's worth noting that funding can make up for shortfalls in other areas and that strengths in other areas reduce the need for funds.

An Example

The table below gives a simple example of these ideas in action. It analyzes the situation of a hypothetical company facing a major product recall. Objectives in this case are “monitor and respond” to public opinion and provide “customer support” to previous buyers. Highlighting these shows that social networks, Twitter, message boards and Wikis are appropriate options. But let’s assume it’s a small company, with limited media reach and funding, and that it also lacks technology and experience for social networks and Wikis. This leaves Twitter and message boards as the best candidates -- Twitter because there's very little technology involved, and message boards because we assume that company has the necessary resources in place.



Although this example is limited to social media, the same approach can be applied to other media as well. Tune into the Webinar for more details.

Clarifying the Differences Between Database and Digital Marketing

Summary: Database and digital marketing are both data-driven. But they differ in plenty of other ways that make it hard for specialists in one to adapt smoothly to the other. Here's a detailed look at the differences.

Yesterday’s long (or merely long-winded?) post described the different mindsets of database and digital marketers but it was pretty short on differences between the two marketing methods themselves. Today I’ll try to be more concrete.

DB or Not DB

Database marketing is built around a marketing database that contains addressable, identifiable individuals. By “addressable”, I mean there is information such as a mailing address or phone number that lets the marketer contact the individual. By “identifiable”, I mean information is available to link data about the same individual from multiple sources. Addresses are the most common identifiable information, although there are also non-address identifiers such as Social Security Number. Addresses and identifiers are both required: a database without addresses couldn’t be used for most marketing, and a set of records that can’t be linked to other sources is just a list.

The consolidated database is the heart of the database marketing concept. Data from multiple sources lets database marketers make more effective predictions about the best treatments for each individual, and treatments across multiple channels are more effective when they are coordinated centrally. The marketing database contains attributes (age, income, location, etc.) and behaviors (promotion responses, purchases, customer service interactions, etc.). It can certainly include digital activities such as Web page views and social media comments, so long as these can be linked back to a known individual.

Digital marketing does not use a database of addressable, identifiable individuals. It may gather information from one source and even track it over time for the same entity. (Example: Web site behavior tied to a browser cookie.) But unless the entity can be linked to other sources through an identifier, the digital marketer can only make treatment decisions based on information captured in the source channel itself. This is far from useless – behavioral and contextual targeting can be quite powerful. But from a database marketing perspective, the data is frustratingly incomplete.

Addressable Media

Database marketing only works in addressable media: that is, where a message can sent to a specific individual. Addressable media include direct mail, email, outbound telemarketing, and customer service interactions. They can also include digital channels such as Web pages, mobile messages, kiosks and ATM machines, but ONLY where the recipient is known before a message is sent. Thus, a Web page that has identified me because I’ve registered and logged in (manually or via a cookie) is addressable; a Web page that I visit anonymously, even if it recognizes me as a previous visitor from a cookie, is not addressable.

Digital marketing includes many non-addressable media, including paid and organic search, Web banner advertising, social media, and anonymous forms of Web sites, kiosks, mobile (e.g., location-based messages), and the rest. These generate plenty of useful data, such as click through rates, search rankings, sentiment analysis, and page views. But this data and related analysis are quite different from what database marketers are used to.

Prediction vs Reaction

Database marketers have the rich information needed to accurately predict which offers are most appropriate for each customer. Combined with their access to customer addresses, this allows them to initiate effective outbound marketing campaigns and to define static rules for interactive dialogs. Note that in most addressable media (mail, email, outbound telemarketing), the offer must be selected before the customer is actually contacted, and making multiple offers often reduces response. So database marketers have strong reasons to work on making highly accurate predictions.

By definition, digital marketers cannot target outbound campaigns at individuals. They do have opportunities to manage interactions, but often know only what has happened during the current interaction itself. This greatly reduces their ability to make predictions. Instead, they present multiple options and react as people respond. Happily, most digital media are inherently interactive, so this is a practical approach. Since rule-based decision flows are less viable as the number of options increases, digital marketers lean more heavily on self-adjusting automated decision engines.

Message Control

Database marketers directly control the messages they send to each customer. This is yet another factor that helps to justify the costs of building a comprehensive database, running sophisticated predictive models and precisely customizing each message.

Digital marketers have vastly less control over who sees what. Much of their messaging is blind to the audience who will see it, or can only be targeted on limited information about behavior or context. Indeed, some of the most effective and intriguing digital marketing techniques, such as viral campaigns and shareable widgets, rely on distribution that's totally beyond the marketer's control. Social media provide even less control, since the messages themselves are composed outside the company. The net result of all this is to reduce the degree of individual targeting that digital marketers can execute.

Response Measurement

Database marketers can typically capture response to a promotion directly, with a coupon, telephone call or Web click. Even when they can’t, their database still ultimately tells them who bought what, so they can correlate the promotions they’ve addressed to an individual with that individual’s subsequent behavior. The ability to do precise response measurement is yet another factor that lets database marketers fine-tune their programs.

Digital marketers can also measure who clicks on a Web ad, and sometimes can track that person further into the buying cycle. But they don’t know what other promotions or social media that person saw, what else they purchased, who else saw the same promotion but didn’t respond, or who responded through some other channel. All these uncertainties leave digital marketers reliant on indirect measures, such as consumer panels and surveys, which are more typical of conventional mass media. These are approaches that most database marketers would find almost laughably imprecise.

What’s It All Mean?

Database marketers and digital marketers both have plenty of data and the good ones are highly analytical. Both can apply advanced statistical techniques and rigorous testing methods. Both can work to integrate their data and their customer strategies across channels. To some extent, they even work with the same media: in particular, a Web site can support both digital (anonymous) and database-driven (addressable) marketing programs.

Yet despite these similarities and interactions, the two groups work in largely different media, use different techniques and have different priorities. Database marketing is inherently more controlled and precise; digital marketing is more fluid. Good marketers will learn to apply both. But individuals who have specialized in any one area will find it hard to adjust to the other. At a minimum, they’ll need to be conscious that the old rules don’t apply.

Adjustment is even harder for organizations, who will have invested in specialized systems, processes and people to support one technique or the other. This, in my opinion, is why the leading database marketing vendors have not been the leading digital marketing vendors. Which, if you’ll recall, was where I started this discussion.

One final point: there's no reason the same organization or individual can't master both database and digital marketing. That is, although there are major differences between the two, there is no fundamental conflict. My point in these articles is simply that it will take conscious effort to address the differences and fill the gaps that they imply.

Unica and Alterian Lead Database Marketers to the Digital Promised Land

Here are some quick thoughts on two items: Unica’s acquisition of paid search bid management system MakeMeTop (now mercifully renamed Unica Search) and Alterian’s recently-released and excellent annual marketing survey.

The connection is that these both support my feeling that many members of the old-line database marketing community have failed to adapt to the new world of digital marketing. I’ve been talking about this a lot with consulting clients but don’t think I’ve written about it at length in this blog.

The gist of the argument is that traditional direct marketing agencies, marketing automation software vendors and marketing services providers have mostly remained focused on outbound campaigns. They did move from direct mail to email, but those are pretty much the same thing. The really cool digital marketing stuff, including Web site development, Web advertising and most recently social media, has been executed by a different set of digital marketing agencies, specialist software vendors, and, ironically, media buyers at traditional ad agencies.

The fundamental reason is that the main skill of database marketers is building a customer database, while the core of digital marketing is responding to the behaviors of anonymous individuals. Of course I’m oversimplifying – much digital marketing does deal with people who have identified themselves – but there’s still a fundamental shift from targeting outbound campaigns at known individuals to managing interactions with anyone willing to engage.

Both Unica and Alterian have been exceptionally forward-thinking among marketing automation vendors in preparing for this transition. Unica’s latest acquisition is particularly interesting because search bid management has almost nothing to do with reaching known individuals. (I say “almost” only because Unica seems to intend to link search click-throughs to a traditional marketing database.) It follows Unica’s acquisition last month of email deliverability expert Pivotal Veracity, which I found less impressive because email is part of the old database marketing world.

Alterian has already made big bets in social media and Web content management, which are also well beyond the scope of traditional database marketing. Its survey provides strong support for the notion that marketers are “moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer engagement”: in fact, 51% said they were expending a fair or significant amount of effort on exactly that. Related factoids include:

- 61% of marketers do not integrate Web analytics with other customer data.

- 66% of respondents (which included quite a few agencies and marketing services providers, in addition to marketers) plan to invest in social media marketing in 2010

- 36% of respondents plan to invest in social media monitoring in 2010 (a discrepancy that Alterian finds “worrying”, although I’ve previously seen similar data. My take is that many marketers see social media as a way to generate business directly, and look at monitoring as a secondary aim.)

- 38% said coordinating digital and direct marketing agencies was somewhat or very difficult. No surprise there, although I don't necessarily agree with Alterian's contention that this will lead to a unification between the two sets of agencies.

- 35% of marketers expect to move more than 20% of their direct marketing budget into digital channels next year.

In short, the Alterian survey shows that marketers are eagerly moving from classic direct marketing to digital, interactive and social marketing, but still lack the skills and resources to do it effectively. Industry vendors who support them will thrive. Those who don't will quickly be left behind.

Spredfast Offers Systematic Management for Social Media Campaigns

Summary: Social Agency’s Spredfast helps marketers schedule social media campaigns the same way they schedule paid advertising. Cool.

It seems like common courtesy to listen to an existing conversation before jumping in with a comment. If social media worked the same way, companies would first buy a monitoring system to track what’s being said, followed by tools to respond to comments made by others. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word.

Silly me. I should have known that marketers talk first and listen later.

I’m not talking about personal style, although the decibel level at any marketing conference speaks for itself. But a recent eMarketer article B2B Marketers to Increase Social Spend cited two surveys that showed this is also a matter of policy.

Specifically, a study from Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions found the most common use for social media was to “generate awareness” (25%), while another study in B2B Magazine found the top use for social networks was “thought leadership” (60%). True listening ranked fifth in the Visible Technologies/SiriusDecision survey (“monitor and respond” at 14%), and third in the B2B Magazine survey (“customer feedback” at 46%).

On reflection, this makes sense. Marketers are primarily interested in getting out their messages. Perhaps this is an old habit that will change in a customer-driven world. But I suspect that marketing results will always be driven by activity, and results are ultimately what matter. So I’ve now revised my expected sequence of social media activities to start with broadcast, only then followed by monitor, respond, initiate individual conversations and empower advocates.

Armed with this insight, I was much less surprised when Kenneth Cho of social marketing agency Social Agency told me that his new social media campaign tool Spredfast had been purchased immediately after release by major companies including AOL, IBM, HP, Cisco and Porter Novelli. Although I’ve seen plenty of “listening platforms” like Radian6, Alterian Techrigy and Scout Labs, I hadn't previously seen a system aimed primarily at managing outbound social messages. (Now that I'm looking, though, I find that ObjectiveMarketer seems to offer something similar.)

Of course, the listening platforms can also post social media messages, as can the social media features now found in many marketing automation systems. What distinguishes Spredfast is that marketers can schedule their posts through the life of a social media campaign, rather than simply replying or initiating conversations on demand. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too.

Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). The campaign calendar lays out of scheduled events by all voices over time, and is color-coded to show whether a particular event has already been delivered, is ready to go, or still needs approved content. This looks strikingly similar to the media plan for a flight of broadcast ads and serves very much the same purpose.

Users can drill into an event to add the content itself including bit.ly links that allow the system to track the click-through. One particularly nice feature is that when users assign the same content to multiple events, the system will automatically create different bit.ly links for each event. This makes it easy to track results for each event independently.

Spredfast's developers also recognized that large companies will have many different people working on different aspects of a project. Users can be assigned rights to specific campaigns, voices and events, with precise control over who can view, edit and approve content. Pricing is based on the number of campaigns, not users, so large organizations can incorporate as many people as needed.

As the bit.ly tags suggest, Spredfast also pays substantial attention to measurement. It provides three major summary metrics:

- activity (how much content the system is publishing),
- reach (the number of views, friends, followers, subscribers, etc.), and
- engagement (numbers of comments, retweets, likes, etc.).

Top-level reports summarize these by campaign and let users drill down to see detailed statistics by channel and voice and, ultimately, the actual content such as comments or reviews.

The system archives content and responses so they remain available even after they are dropped from the social media platforms that originally carried them. In addition to cumulative statistics, Spredfast displays daily statistics for the past seven days, giving a sense of trends.

Perhaps wisely, Spredfast's developers drew the line at reporting the raw numbers for its metrics. Users who want more elaborate scoring, perhaps applying different weights to different kinds of activities, can export the raw data and calculate outside the system. Similarly, Spredfast makes no attempt at relating social media programs to business results such as leads or revenue.

The system does provide what Cho called a “minimalist” listening platform, which can automatically search across public listening tools (Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, Twitter, Boardreader, Bing) for key words, and present any results so users can review and republish or reply to them. It also provides an RSS reader for feeds selected by the user, as well as a site indexer that can show the frequency of different terms in user-specified blogs as a word cloud. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.

Spredfast began its public beta in mid-November. The system is a vendor-hosted service. It is available in a free version with limited functionality; a $50 per month standard version with one campaign, no collaboration and no metrics after the first month; and $250 per month enterprise version supporting all features for up to three campaigns.

Survey Suggests Marketers Are Moving from Paid to Social Media

Summary: a new survey suggests that marketers are less focused on lead generation than on final sales, growing current customers and building online communities. I’m not sure I trust the data, but it’s a pretty picture nevertheless.

I don’t know quite what to make of the 2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement released earlier this month by custom content company King Fish Media.

- On one hand, it’s a rare opportunity to see data from business, rather than consumer, marketers. (Of the 230 respondents, 52% were pure B2B and another 36% were mixed B2B and business-to-consumer.) So I'd really like to believe it.

- But on the other hand, the sample seems dangerously unrepresentative: 44% said their organization’s primary industry was “publishing/media/advertising/marketing”, which is vastly higher than the real-world proportion. Presumably this was the result of the survey method – an online survey based on email invitations to the lists of King Fish and co-sponsors HubSpot, Junta42 and Upshot Institute. In addition to the industry skew, this probably reached a group that’s much more online-oriented than marketers as a whole.

The best I can do is to treat the results very carefully: assuming that this group shares some characteristics of the broader universe, but keeping in mind that some answers might reflect its atypical composition. Here goes.

1. Marketing Measurement Practices

The group reported using three broad types of marketing success measurements:

- 91% measured new customers acquired or leads generated.
- 63% measured customer retention or sales from current customers or lapsed customers.
- 54% measured brand-marketing-style metrics such as awareness, perception or intent.

Directionally, this seems about right: more marketers focus on new business than on existing customers, and brand-style measurements are less common than business results. The figures for existing-customer measurements are higher than I would expect, but perhaps that’s because publishing marketers are more directly responsible for renewals than business marketers in general.

Another oddity was that more people report measuring new customers (77%) than leads (73%). An optimist would treat this as evidence that marketers are adopting an end-to-end vision (as they should) rather than ending their responsibility when a lead is handed over to sales. But think the more likely cause is that marketers in publishing are more likely to sell directly (i.e., without a sales force) than in other industries.

Incidentally, the survey also found that 73% of respondents had guidelines in place to measure marketing success, but just 50% said their company requires a measurement plan as part of its program approval process. Treat this as you wish: is it impressive that 73% have measurement guidelines or frightening that 27% do not? Also bear in mind that 91% were at least using measurement on acquisition programs (some, apparently, without standard guidelines). So I think we can conclude that basic measurement is widespread, although its quality and consistency are questionable.

2. Spending on Acquisition vs. Existing Customers

Media spending by purpose was distributed:

- 56% for new leads
- 33% for retention
- 10% for other

This is interesting because I don’t recall seeing other data showing this split. The actual numbers show much more spending on retention than I would have expected. As with the measurement figures, this probably reflects the business of the survey responders.

3. Media Preferences

The main thrust of the survey was how marketers view different media. Marketers were asked to rate "the most effective way to communicate with customers and prospects", with separate answers for each. Here are the results:

	for prospects/leads	for current customers
corporate Web site	75%	70%
social media	73%	72%
custom content and media	70%	77%
face-to-face events	69%	62%
white papers / e-books	67%	52%
Webcasts and virtual trade shows	64%	51%
e-mail marketing	58%	78%
online advertising	42%	13%
direct mail promotions	33%	34%
print advertising	33%	17%
broadcast advertising	10%	11%

If there’s a pattern here, it’s that awareness-generating media (e-mail, direct mail and online/print/broadcast advertising) rank shockingly low, especially for prospecting. Apart from using email for customer communications, the respondents gave their highest rankings to the corporate Web site, social media, and custom content.

But how, exactly, can they attract traffic for the Web site, social media message and custom content if they don’t reach out to new audiences? I can think of (at least) two answers:

- they can’t, and the answers just reflect an infatuation with online media. I’m not saying the respondents are poor marketers: chances are they really do use the low-ranked media, but don’t consider them terribly effective. (Other answers in the survey suggest the same thing, showing that budgets are moving away from the low-ranking media to the high-ranked categories.)

- they can, by using social media and custom media in the awareness- and traffic-building roles previously handled by paid advertising. Put another way, the traditional first steps of generating awareness and interest are handled by the community rather than by marketers themselves. In this world, marketing’s role becomes to nurture communities of enthusiasts and evangelists, and then to meet the needs of prospects attracted by the community. This is what I meant in my September 23 post about community-centric marketing replacing customer centricity. (Can I coin CBM as a new acronym for Community Based Marketing?)

Obviously the second possibility is more intriguing. It’s surely correct to some degree, although the Big Question is how quickly and how far marketers’ role will shift. Given my concerns about this survey, I wouldn’t treat its results as definitive answers. But they're still tasty food for thoughts.

RightNow Adds Social Community Capabilities (But Don't Expect Support Costs to Fall as a Result)

Summary: RightNow has extended its social media footprint by purchasing HiveLive, which lets companies build public and private communities. It also released a benchmark survey showing that online channels (email, chat, Web self-service) don't do much to reduce customer service telephone calls.

In keeping with my recent posts about broader utilization of social media, I had a chat earlier this week with on-demand CRM vendor RightNow , who updated me on their recent purchase of HiveLive. HiveLive provides a social community platform, which means it lets companies build their own discussion groups, forums and such. HiveLive has many features to support business communities, both in terms of engaging with customers over issues such as product features and bugs, and in terms of building internal communities such as project teams.

HiveLive fits with RightNow’s vision of giving customers a seamless flow between community applications and a company’s traditional service systems. For example, if a question posted to a forum goes unanswered for a specified time, it can be escalated into a service system as a case to be handled by the company’s support group. If I understood correctly, RightNow and HiveLive can do this already.

We discussed deeper sharing, such as having answers developed in a public forum become part of a company’s internal customer service knowledgebase. That’s something RightNow may add in the future.

Our discussion veered onto other topics, and in particular how seriously companies really take the goal of improving the customer experience. RightNow shared a copy of its recent RightNow Multi-Channel Contact Center Benchmark Report, which was interesting in its own right.

One tidbit I found particularly intriguing was how few telephone service calls are “deflected” into email, chat and Web self-service channels. In the survey, most companies reported that fewer than 10% of customers in those channels would otherwise have made a phone call.

You could see this as bad news for the theory that having alternate channels available will reduce the need for call center agents. Or you could consider it good news that customers have more choices to pick the interaction method they find most congenial.

Another interesting item was that 55% of companies have some mechanism to gather feedback from customers, but just 10% of those use an IVR survey, which I personally consider the most effective way to gain broad participation. Again, you can treat this as good news (at least half the companies are trying) or bad news (just 5% of the total are doing it effectively). Either way, it’s food for thought.

Acxiom Uses Social Media Data to Segment Email Lists

Summary: Acxiom's new social media marketing tool gathers public data about social media links and uses it to segment email lists. It's a different, and arguably more practical, approach to helping marketers take advantage of social media.

Acxiom last week released a new “social media marketing” solution called Relevance-X Social.

The press release is frustratingly vague (“With the ability to engage socially active customers and prospects in their preferred networks, marketers can link that knowledge to relevant communications that ignite conversations on behalf of the brand.”) But, on talking to the company, it turns out there is a pretty interesting product here. (Disclosure: I am a consultant to Acxiom, although I had nothing to do with this product).

What Acxiom has done – and this is so Acxiom – is to ignore the content posted in people’s social media comments or profiles, and just capture the “hard” information about links between people and membership in groups. Apparently (and I’m taking Acxiom’s word on this), this data is publicly available from most social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo and some more specialized ones) once you know someone’s email address. So Acxiom has taken its own database of more than 500 million email addresses and found the connections for each.

Relevance-X then accepts a marketer’s own email list – presumably its customers or prospects – and returns information from its own database about the matching names. This avoids at least some privacy and spam issues, since marketers are only given information about people they already have some type of relationship with.

The main application of this information is sending targeted emails. Thus, a bank might send one message to customers who belonged to a financial planning group, and a different message to customers who don’t. Other segmentation might be based on the total number of connections, membership in the company's own fan group, or information the company already knows from other sources.

The key point here is that Acxiom is using social media to execute traditional database marketing. This is quite different from most social media marketing products, which boil down to monitoring for posts on specified topics, responding to individuals, or to publishing messages to groups through the network itself. In a way, it seems rather old-fashioned to use social media data as a basis for outbound marketing. But for marketers struggling to find a practical use for social media, it's better than many alternatives.

(As Ed Park points out in a comment below, other vendors including RapLeaf and Unbound Technology also build similar databases by capturing social media links.)

Relevance-X includes two other components. One is the ability to tag the content it publishes – such as links within emails or messages posted to group pages – so marketers can track response. This is done with standard page tags and browser cookies, so what’s important here is not the technology but the ability to measure results. Again, this is something that traditional database marketers consider essential – and that other social media products sometimes struggle to accomplish.

The other component is a separate social media monitoring service that tracks keyword mentions, sentiments and trends, but on an aggregate basis rather than by tracking individuals. Acxiom is using a third party product for this. The goal is to supplement the direct response tracking with a more general measure of marketing program impacts.

Pricing for Relevance-x Social is based on the number of relationships (typically email addresses) researched and on the number, size and complexity of the campaigns being managed. It can be purchased on a campaign-by-campaign basis or annual subscription. Pricing for a basic campaign could start at around $25,000.

A Heartwarming Story of Social Media, Family and QlikView

My son works as a sports researcher at a cable television network. His job seems mainly to be looking things up in online databases and, on broadcast days, watching several games simultaneously. It's nice work if you can get it.

In terms of technology, Microsoft Word and Excel meet most of his needs. But I did introduce him to QlikView several years back, and he learned enough to analyze statistics for his college basketball team. When QlikView introduced its free Personal Edition, he decided to use it at work to track a database of college recruiting prospects. Despite (or because of) his lack of technical background, and without any formal QlikView training, he created a very nice system to find prospects based on different characteristics and create ad hoc statistical summaries.

The centerpiece is a map that displays the number of recruits by state. Because this is QlikView, the map is automatically redrawn each time he makes a selection: so he can see recruits for a certain position, or going to a particular school, or whatever. This is the sort of thing that gets sports people excited. In fact, his colleagues were so pleased that there’s talk of using a version of the map on-air.

The only fly in this ointment was that neither he nor I could find a way to get the map to show the numbers for all the states simultaneously. We could get different sized bubbles reflecting the state counts, and we could see the actual figure for each state by hovering over it. Recognizing my own limits as a QlikView developer, I asked for help on the QlikView user forum and from friend on the QlikView consulting staff. The consultant didn't think it was possible, so we let the matter drop.

Fast-forward one month, to yesterday, when I received a notification that someone had responded to my forum query with a solution. It took a couple of tries, and some additional help from forum members, to get it to work on my son’s map. But you can imagine how pleased we were when we finally saw the map as originally envisioned.

This story illustrates quite a bit about QlikView. Building the original map was easy – my son was able to do it with little help, even though QlikView was doing some very sophisticated processing under the hood. (Specifically, on-the-fly data aggregation along user-defined calculated dimensions, without touching the underlying database). But getting the system to do exactly what he needed did take some special knowledge. (He had to use the number of students by state as his primary dimension, not the X/Y map coordinates.) The adjustment took just a few minutes, but only a QlikView expert would realize that’s how you do it.

To generalize a bit more broadly, then, QlikView really does enable non-technical users to do amazing things, and it really is as powerful as its advocates (myself included) like to claim. But users do need some training to be effective – something that advocates are sometimes reluctant to admit.

The story also illustrates the value of social media. QlikView’s forum is an amazing source of help for users of all skill levels. It works because QlikView has a community of highly engaged advocates who are both expert in the product and willing to help each other.

The forum provides several strategic benefits for QlikView: it helps users become successful (thus driving wider adoption); it lets users succeed even if they don’t receive proper training (which many will not, particularly among users of the free Personal Edition); it reduces the need for paid support staff; and it provides a window into common problems and requirements. It also reinforces the commitment of the engaged users themselves, by publicly rewarding their contributions. Although I’ve never discussed the forum with QlikView management, they obviously understand these benefits well enough to justify their continued investments in it.

This isn’t to say that social media would provide the same value to everyone. QlikView fits several specific conditions – enthusiastic expert users, problems that can be solved fairly easily, etc. – that won’t always apply. But as an example what social media can sometimes accomplish, QlikView is a great case study waiting to be written.

Why Social Media Really Matters

Summary: marketing has shifted steadily over time from passive to active consumer engagement. Social media is the latest stage in this evolution. Marketers need to master new skills at each stage; as they do, advertising budgets will shift to take advantage of the new medium's increased effectiveness.

Of all that research I mentioned last week, two pairs of facts stood out. One was the disparity between the time people spend on online activities (20% to 30% of total media time) and the share of advertising expenditures spent online (10% to 15%). Although some difference may be justified by the differences in media effectiveness, this still suggests to me that ad spending will continue to shift into online media until the spending is roughly proportional.

The other disparity was that search accounts for 5% of online time but 60% of online ad spending. Some of this may be due to the fact that it’s much easier to buy search advertising (think Google AdWords) than other types of online ads. But I think the primary reason is that search serves as a gateway to other Internet activity—so marketers wishing to drive traffic to their own Web sites need search advertising to make this happen.

The final, related factoid is that social media have grown from virtually nothing to nearly 20% of online time over the past few years. This matters because social media are an alternative gateway to finding Web content: instead of doing a search, I can ask my online community for information or recommendations. Thus, social media present a major threat to search advertising revenues. Although social media currently gather under 3% of online advertising, this will surely change as marketers work to find ways to exploit its potential. If you’ve been wondering why Google should be concerned about Twitter and Facebook, that’s your answer.

These shifts from offline to online advertising and from search to social media suggest a progression through four stages:

1. mass media, or broadcasting: this began in the late 19th century with the emergence of national brands and national print media. Today it is represented primarily by television. You can date TV-dominated era from, say, 1950 to 1985.

2. database marketing, or, more poetically, narrowcasting. This is about direct contact with segmented groups of customers. Date it from 1985 to 1997.

3. search marketing. This is characterized by use of search engines to drive traffic to Web sites. I’m being arbitrary but let's date it from 1998 to 2007.

4. social marketing. This is use of social media to connect with consumers. I’ll date it from 2008, although effective marketing uses of social media are just starting to emerge.

As each new medium has emerged over years, some portion of advertising dollars has shifted from the preexisting media. Of course, the old media don’t go away completely. Indeed, traditional mass media (including radio and print as well as TV) still account for the largest share of advertising spend.

The four media differ along several dimensions. These include:

- consumer engagement. Broadcast is the most passive medium; essentially, it’s yelling at people who may or may not be interested in the message. The audience in database marketing is still passive, but it's targeted at segments that marketers have some reason to believe are interested. With search marketing, the consumer takes a somewhat active role in deciding what to look for, even though the ads themselves are still placed by marketers. With social marketing, control is directly in the hands of consumers, who decide which messages they will receive.

- authority. I find this an intriguing concept. Basically it has to do with how consumers decide which messages they should believe. In the mass media, authority is essentially conferred – people believe things because they are "seen on TV" or have the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval". With database marketing, the medium (typically direct mail, more recently email or telephone) doesn’t itself confer much authority, so the message itself must command attention because it’s relevant to the consumer’s needs of the moment. This relevance motivates the recipient to actively explore the marketing offer and assess whether its source is credible.

In search marketing, the source of authority is implicitly based on the group itself: Google PageRank is largely determined by the number of links to a Web site – a version of “wisdom of the crowd”. With social marketing, group-based authority is explicit: consumers can see the number of followers, recommendations, reviews and other ratings provided by group members and decide whether to trust them.

- post-sale relationship. This defines the relationship between the marketer and consumer after the initial purchase. In the mass media world, the relationship barely exists: customers use the product and, hopefully, like it enough to buy it again. At most they ask for service if there’s a problem. With database marketing, post-sales contacts become important for cross-sell, upsell and retention. Indeed, this is where database marketing truly shines because it’s where rich data is available for targeting and relationship building.

Search marketing reaches a new level of engagement because customers can interact directly with the company Web site. This lets them initiate transactions, send messages, and in some cases actually change product configurations such as setting telephone features. With social marketing, consumers take direct control, initiating engagement themselves and, even more important, publicly sharing their engagements with other community members.

- marketing focus. This shows the critical task that marketers must master. With mass media, the primary marketing goal is selecting a message that builds a successful brand. For database marketers, the key skill is effective segmentation. Search marketing is primarily focused on developing content, both to attract traffic via organic search and to meet consumer needs once they appear at the site. For social marketing, the ultimate goal is convincing consumers to become brand advocates. Content is still important, of course, but its nature shifts from information that visitors consume to tools like widgets that empower them to share their enthusiasm with others.

The following table summarizes these dimensions.

medium	consumer engagement	authority	post-sale relationship	marketing focus
mass media (broadcasting)	passively exposed	conferred	service / support	brand message
database marketing (narrowcasting)	targeted	relevance-based	cross sell / upsell / retention	segmentation
search marketing	activity-triggered	implicit group	Web self-service	content
social marketing	consumer-controlled	explicit group	public engagement	empowerment

At the risk of stating the obvious, the table shows a steady increase in consumer empowerment from the passive receipt of mass marketing message to active control in social media. Because this is a fundamental change from traditional mass media marketing, it has several important implications:

- for each new medium, marketers must learn new skills.

- as marketers learn new skills, they will use the new medium more effectively.

- as marketers use the new medium more effectively, it will receive increasing portions of their ad budgets.

- since social media is very new, its share of advertising budgets will continue to grow for some time.

In short, social media matters not because it's cool, but because it offers marketers a new and more effective way to reach their consumers. Marketers who fail to master the required skills will fall behind marketers who do.

Show Me the Numbers: Hard Data on Internet Use and Media Spend

Summary: Here are links to about twenty studies with statistics on online media consumption and advertising spend. Many are contradictory, but it's clear that marketers need to invest in social media, which might eventually replace search as the primary way that customers find them.

I’m sitting on a panel next week that will discuss long-term marketing trends. Naturally I have plenty of opinions on the topic, but just for fun I decided to scare up a few facts to reinforce them. This led to a highly entertaining, though uncompensated, scavenger hunt through the Web.

You won’t be surprised that there’s plenty of data out there. But I thought I’d share some of sources I found for answers to my basic questions, and perhaps a couple of insights I hadn’t quite considered before.

1. How are people actually spending their time online? And, in particular, are social media as important as industry gurus claim they are?

Probably the most comprehensive study along these lines was Global Faces and Networked Places, released by Neilsen in March 2009. This showed that as of December 2008, search was still the most common Internet activity (used by 85.9% of the online population), compared with just 65.1% for email. Social networks and blogs are the fastest growing application, now exceeding email with a participation rate of 66.8%.

Digging a little deeper within the social media category, the women’s blogger community BlogHer reported in its 2009 Women and Social Media Study that as of March 2009, 75% of women participated in social networks, compared with 55% who read blogs, 40% read message boards or forums, and 16% update status on platforms like Twitter. (The Twitter figures are surely much higher by now.) Nineteen percent actually publish their own blog while 29% comment on blogs. This reinforces (at least for women) the sense that social networks are rapidly emerging as the dominant Web activity.

Netpop Research reinforces this point in Media Shifts to Social, which found that as of September and October 2008, communications (including email, instant messaging, blogs and photo sharing) had risen to 32% of online time from 27% in 2006. Entertainment (games, videos, and “accessing Web sites for fun”) dropped from 49% to 20% in the same period. Sadly, the public materials don’t tell us where the rest of the time went. Netpop agreed with BlogHer’s general participation figures, reporting that 76% of American broadband users participate in social media (105 million of 133 million total).

By contrast, the Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey in December 2008 found only 35% of adult online Americans had a social media profile. Based on the other studies, this seems low – although a social media profile is a more restrictive requirement than the other definitions apply. Pew did find that 65% of American teens had profiles.

One drawback with these studies is that they only look whether people participate in different activities, not how much time they spend. The Online Publishers Association has tracked time since 2003 in conjunction with Nielsen. Its most recent report shows that in the past year, time spent on “community” applications like Facebook and Myspace has more than doubled from 8.8% to 18.5% of the total. (Blogs are also apparently part of “community”, although this isn't stated explicitly.) Since total time online has also expanded, time per visitor has grown even more.

Despite the growth of community, the OPA still shows content (40.6%) and communications (25.2) asl the dominant uses. Commerce (11.0%) and search (4.7%) account for the rest.

Looking at older OPA figures, which are available on MarketingCharts, the biggest change is the reduction in communications, which had a 46% share back in 2003. At that time, social networks were lumped into content, which had a 34% share. Today, the combination of content and community accounts for 59% of users’ time.

The position of blogs is ambiguous because most reports lump them in with other social media. Forrester’s just-published The Broad Reach Of Social Technologies contains a table, available in Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell blog, shows that social media “joiners” rose from 25% to 51% of the online population in the past two years, while content “spectators” (which includes blog readers) grow from 48% to 73%. But that’s pretty much the opposite of the BlogHer ratios mentioned earlier (55% blog readers vs. 75% social media participation). So the jury is still out.

Summary: What does it all mean? Here are my main observations:

- social media are indeed booming, but still account for a minority of online time. So even though marketers need to find ways to use social media for business purposes, they still have time to figure it out.

- everybody uses search, but they don’t spend much time on it. Search still earns the bulk of online advertising fees because it's a gateway to other content, and perhaps because it's the easiest Web advertising to buy and optimize. But its share may erode as social media provide alternative paths to desired content.

- blogs are probably growing more slowly than other social media, but they still account for a substantial portion of online activity. Marketers might be investing in blogs than they are really worth.

2. How does consumption of online media compare with consumption of other media?

Council for Research Excellence’s Video Consumer Mapping Study found more than five hours of TV watching per day (43% of total media time), vs. 80 minutes of Internet usage (10.7%). The Internet figure seems low, but this was a very careful and sophisticated study. These figures may only include the time when a medium had the consumer's primary attention -- so just having an instant message window open on your desktop wouldn't count.

Magazine Publishers Association reported the share of time with different media, although you have to read the table carefully because it reports minutes spent by of “users” of each medium rather than the average across all consumers. But the MPA also points to a study from MRI MediaDay (again published on Marketing Charts) showing the percentage of consumers using each medium. The combined figures show an average consumer spends about four and a half hours of TV per day (47.5% of total time) but only one and half hours of Internet (15.2% of total).

Incidentally, the MPA also argues that time alone isn’t the best measure of advertising value, since some media are more influential with their consumers than others. This is a point worth considering. The MPA bases this on Deloitte's State of the Media Democracy Survey, which unfortunately I couldn't find posted. The MPA provides other, related data in its 92-page guide Magazines: The Medium of Action.

A Forrester chart, posted on CNET shows five years of data on time spent per week with major media. The chart shows that Internet has more than doubled since 2004 and nearly caught up with TV. It reports about two hours per day with TV, accounting for about 34% of total time vs. 33% for Internet.

The Media Audit gives yet another set of statistics on time by medium. It also finds that TV is just slightly ahead of online, at 33% vs. 29% of time respectively. But it pegs TV viewing around three and a half hours per day.

Summary: These are serious conflicts, which I see no way to reconcile. Two studies show TV and Internet each accounting for about one-third of media time, while the other two show TV accounting for about 45% and Internet for 10-15%. The wide variations in estimated total time are also, um, noteworthy.

3. What is the share of ad spending for different media?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates report in their Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013 (via eMarketer) that ad spending will total $170 billion this year, including $62 billion (36%) for TV and $25 billion (15%) for Internet and mobile.

Zenith Optimedia pretty much agrees: its October 2008 report shows U.S. spending at $179 billion for 2008, with a worldwide share of 37.5% for TV and 10.2% for the Internet.

On the other hand, the Direct Marketing Association shows spending at $339 billion total in 2008 including $75.9 billion (22.4%) for TV and $39.4 billion (11.6)%) for “new media and other”, which presumably includes Internet. The DMA also breaks out the portion of each medium used for direct response. It must have a pretty generous definition, since it puts 52.1% of the total in that category.

WPP’s groupm estimates in its Interaction: Addressable, Searchable, Social and Mobile study (via MarketingCharts) that interactive media’s share of total advertising is 14% in North America and 13% worldwide for 2008.

Summary: it’s hard to compare these figures, but everyone agrees that online spending is somewhere between 10-15% of the total, while TV gets 30% or more. Assuming that consumers spend about the same amount of time with both, and that advertising on both is equally effective, online media should get a larger share of ad budgets.

4. Where are marketers moving their budgets?

Forrester and Marketing Profs report B-to-B Marketing in 2009 shows that business marketers most commonly use their company Web site, email, public relations and trade shows. Another table from the same study, referenced by The Event Marketing Insider, shows marketers plan their greatest increases for the company Web site, search marketing, online video and Webinars.

A Forrester chart posted on Mashable shows interactive marketing spend by category, projected from 2009 to 2014. Search marketing accounts for about $15 billion of $25 billion total today and will grow 15% per year vs. 17% for the total. Mobile marketing and social media will grow faster, but will only expand from 4.4% in 2009 to 8% in 2014. Email marketing and display advertising account for the balance.

Online Marketing Blog surveyed marketers about their planned digital marketing channels in 2009. The top three were: blogging (34%), microblogging (Twitter) (29%) and Search engine optimization (28%).

Summary: marketers are moving their budgets online, primarily into the traditional channels (blogging, Web site, search).

4. Which media most affect purchase decisions?

Marketing Sherpa found buyers making complex purchases were relying more heavily on virtual events (Webinars, trade shows), search engines and Web sites, and less heavily on email, face-to-face trade shows, video programming and advertising.

Forrester (via ReadWriteWeb) found emails from friends, consumer reviews and search engines were the most trusted information sources, while personal blogs, company social networking profiles, and company blogs are least trusted.

TNS Media Intelligence in Digital World, Digital Life (via eMarketer) found that recommendations by friends, online news, newspapers and TV news were the most trusted information sources, while user forums, company brochures, free newspapers and private blogs were least trusted. Product comparison sites, industry Web sites and company Web sites were in the middle.

Summary: Marketers may be overspending on blogs and search. Social media could be a better investment -- if we could find a way to use them effectively.