‘Social’ content, as a rival to ‘professional’ content, has two key implications for media and advertisers. Not only does it provide competition for the eyes and ears of consumers but it also provides an alternative and unadulterated, point of view.
It’s not just how much is being said, but what is actually being said – and the degree to which socially created content is starting to overshadow the professional version is probably bigger than most think. The last year has seen the twenty most popular social media sites triple their share of web pages viewed in the UK.
By Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen Online
According to BlogPulse, there are now almost 69 million English-language blogs globally. The last 24 hours have seen 93,000 new blogs and almost 665,000 new blog posts. That’s an awful lot of opinion the professionals aren’t in control of – coming from a lot of different people.
A recent Nielsen survey, on the attitudes of online consumers around the world towards advertising, showed the most trusted form of advertising was ‘recommendations from other consumers’ – being cited by 78% of respondents. Furthermore, the third most trusted form of advertising (behind adverts in newspapers at 63%) was ‘consumer opinions posted online’ - being trusted by 61%.
The latter, in effect, means that six in every ten of your potential consumers will trust the recommendation of someone online they don’t know when it comes to deciding which of your products or services to buy. They’re more likely to trust these than your brand website, ads you place in magazines, on TV or radio or before movies, more than emails or texts they receive from you, sponsorships you engage in, search engine ads or banner ads that you place. Brand Association Maps (BAM) which plot language, attributes and issues around a topic show that, for ‘advertising’, attributes like “false”, “deceptive” and “misleading” are highly associated.
What people are saying about you can have more effect than all of your marketing activities, so it’s vital to understand what is being said and the sentiment behind it – the ‘buzz’. Our studies in the US have shown that monitoring ‘buzz’ can be like a digital version of a crystal ball when it comes to sales. For example, a well-known pet food manufacturer in the US was consistently cited in the same percentage of blogs until early March this year when suddenly its share of buzz increased twenty-fold in just two-weeks due to a contaminant scare.
This increase in negative buzz preceded a drop in sales by one week and the buzz spike coincided with a 50% drop in sales. So whilst it’s difficult to control what people are saying about you, by monitoring the buzz it can give you a fighting chance, a window, in which to develop appropriate counter-strategies. Word of mouth continues to grow unabated but so does your chance to improve from it.
By Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen Online
