Nielsen Study: Consumers Gather Info Using Social Media

Nielsen research shows that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery. The research included an online panel survey of 1,800 participants fielded in August 2009 .

Findings

A segment of the online population uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information.

Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. Socializers gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it.

 

Social Media Research: 2009 Tribalization of Business Study

Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice recently released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. The study measured the responses of more than 400 companies including Fortune 100 organizations which have created and maintain online communities.

Key findings:

• Marketers are paying close attention to non-active users or “lurkers” – people who observe the community, but don’t participate in the discussion.
• 32 percent of respondents are capturing data on how lurkers derive value from the community
• 20 percent of respondents have set up formal “ambassador” programs, which give outsiders preferential treatment in return for being more active in the community
• 39 percent of the respondents indicated that more full-time people are being deployed to manage the communities
• The top two analytics for measuring success are:
  • Number of active users (34 percent)
  • How often people post/comment (32 percent)

Of the companies surveyed, a majority agreed that the following continue to be top business objectives of online communities:

• Increase word-of-mouth (38 percent)
• Increase customer loyalty (34 percent)
• Increase brand awareness (30 percent)
• Improve idea generation (29 percent)
• Improve the quality of customer support (23 percent)

Twitter Lists: Making this Macro Media More Micro

Twitter Lists seeks to change how people network themselves into groups and geographies. This feature allows Twitter users to group their followers into smaller micro lists such as by organizations, affiliations and  neighborhoods. This gives users the control to refine their large follower lists into smaller, focused micro communities.

Lists can be personal or public. In categorical searches like finding the best Twitterers who cover Capitol Hill, Twitter Lists are more powerful than using Twitter Search because the Lists filter Twitter feeds and searches don’t.

This new feature is getting a lot of attention, mostly because social media right now is somewhat asynchronous with the ideal of social media. That is, it is hard to meaningfully connect and engage with people with huge lists of fans, followers etc. I predict that more social media sites will enable this type of subcategorizing, so that users can gain greater control over engagement.

So, for example, different messages can be shared with friends than business colleagues. This will enable more targeted messages and relationships, getting everyone close to the true promise of social media.