If I were paid $936 for every time someone said in a meeting that brand X or Y didn’t “get” digital or social, I’d be a very rich man.
The problem, however, isn’t just on the client side. There’s enough blame to go around for all of us, including technology companies like social software companies, analytics providers, agencies and the actual social platforms.
The lack of adequate cooperation among infrastructure players is stunting social marketing success and needs to change. Buddy Media will be taking a leadership position in changing this for the better.
Our partnership announced today with comScore, one of the most important companies in digital marketing, is an important step in making this happen. This is just the first of many partnerships that will create a more seamless experience for our clients and allow them to see social as part of a larger business system and not as an end in and of itself.
You can read the actual announcement here for the specifics. But I wanted to outline what this means for Buddy Media clients specifically, and the larger digital marketing industry in general.
For the first time since the advent of social marketing, companies can now easily combine a real-time, cross-platform engagement platform with deep customer insight. The partnership is a bridge between the social activity Buddy Media powers for you on various social platforms, and deep consumer activity and insight from, comScore, the leading provider of such data.
comScore’s partnership with Buddy Media provides “behind the wall” access to exposure and engagement via their 2 million-strong opt-in panel, and opens up insights that then can be easily activated via Buddy Media’s tools.
So what does this actually mean if you currently use the Buddy Media social marketing suite to power your connections? Here are just a few things we’ll now be able to tell you:
~ You will be able to compare the reach and frequency of your brand’s Facebook presence, powered by Buddy Media software, to other media channels.
~ You will be able to determine even more accurately whether you are reaching your actual target consumer, and take steps to improve whether your content hits its mark through the Buddy Media suite.
~ You will be able to better target content via the Buddy Media suite to your fans’ interests and passions. More relevant content will drive more engagement and more engagement, as we know, drives even more engagement. A virtuous cycle!
~ You will be able to better benchmark your social efforts to that of your competitors, and use Buddy Media’s software suite to improve your positioning.
The combination of Buddy Media and comScore’s strengths combines paid, owned and earned media insight and action into one system, and not three independent siloes.
Specifically, comScore will help show the result of the social engagement and subsequent impressions on Facebook that happens for free on a company’s Pages, inside the stream of fans and their friends as well as the effect of paid ads, sponsored stories and Facebook’s other current and future ad products.
The major buckets of actionable insight driven by the partnership include:
- Key Measures: We will show you the total reach and frequency of your brand on Facebook, broken down by paid and earned, and segmented by fans, friends of fans, sponsored stories and social ads.
- Profiling: We will show you insight into the demographics of the above segments as well as interests, search and Internet usage and more.
- Fan Value: We have never subscribed to the validity of the “value of a fan” research that is prevalent today. However, we do think it’s important to measure the value of Facebook impressions and engagement. We will show you how Facebook affects brand search and site visitation and whether you are reaching your specified target market and more.
- Competitive Insight: Your fans are not just engaging with you on Facebook. So we will show you how they are engaging with one or more competitors. This includes fan base overlap information as well as trending data over time (who is gaining momentum and who is losing it?)
While some of this data is available today, the combination of comScore’s panel-based insight and Buddy Media’s real-time engagement data and social software suite will make your company’s social efforts more effective while increasing the value we can deliver to you today. Ultimately, actionable data and the ability to measure results over time against your competition is where we need to go, right?
And what does this mean for the industry? Simple. Social media will now be a part of all digital marketing and not just a cute appendix your CEO wants to check off. This is a trend that is only beginning and we hope to help accelerate next year.
Market demand has pushed social marketing technologies forward at record pace. The research and insight has not kept up. The result has been a social marketing industry that, up until now, has been independent from and, in some cases mutually exclusive to, the larger digital marketing industry. That can’t happen for all of us to succeed.
We are very, very excited about this partnership. But let’s keep in mind that this is just the beginning. You will need at least 500,000 fans to make the data actionable and relevant, so it’s a partnership geared to our largest clients. And the insight is focused for now on just Facebook. comScore and Buddy Media hope to bring additional joint products to market for all the social networks, including Twitter and others.
I’m also excited to be joining comScore CMO and EVP Linda Abraham for a webinar on Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 11:00 am ET, where we will reveal insights on how brands can optimize their social marketing programs and evaluate their effectiveness using metrics that matter. To register for the webinar, please click here.
Thank you for trusting Buddy Media with one of the most important parts of your company’s communications efforts – how you connect with your customers on a regular basis through the web and major social networks. Don’t hesitate to send me an email at Michael at buddymedia dot com if you have other ideas for partnerships and bridges to other technology companies we can explore.
