The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a series of case studies looking at social media marketing. Specifically I’ve been interviewing small to medium-sized tech firms about how they have made the transition from a static, traditional website to one that is more interactive and community oriented. We went with smaller firms because, while Dell and Google have highly engaging Web presences, we wanted to find out how firms with limited budgets are making the transition.

I wrapped up interviewing this week and found some great case examples to work with (thanks to everyone who participated!) though so far no one has felt like they really nailed the strategy, as we expected. All told I got to speak with 10 firms, all in different stages of deployment and with different strategies. There was great diversity, except for one little thing. When I asked how the traffic on the community parts of their websites compared to the corporate site overall we got a relatively tight range:  15%-30% of the corporate traffic is now coming from the site’s community features.

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that I pride myself on my stats chops, so there should be no mistake that this is not a statistically significant finding. But I do find it curious that such a tight range would emerge from just 10 interview, and I have a sneaking suspicion that further research would reveal a finding that is not far off from what we have seen so far. For those readers that have the numbers to weigh in, what have you seen on your own sites?

Not surprisingly the firms with strong discussion forums were up in the 30% range, while those with young blogging efforts were down in the 15% range, though across the board the interviewees reported growing traffic. In addition much of that traffic has been coming from organic search, bringing new visitors to the site, associating the firm’s content with valuable keywords  like “steel pricing”, and generally raising the SEO of the site at large. In fact, the one value of social media marketing that nearly everyone pointed too was search-engine optimization. So, if you’re trying to get a social media project off the ground I highly recommend keeping that nugget in your back pocket. Client engagement may still be a bit soft, but SEO is something most CMOs and even CEOs are willing to get behind.

A 10% boost in traffic (there has to be some overlap) and dramatically improved SEO sounds like a win to me.

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Well, dead may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is clear that the phrase “Web 2.0″ is dying.

This week my new report “Inquiry Insights: Web 2.0 And Social Media Technologies, Q1 2009” hit the Forrester Website. Throughout a given year, Forrester fields thousands of inquiries from clients and non-clients alike . Analyzing the nature and frequency of these inquiries — while not yielding statistically significant conclusions — provides a fascinating window into the minds of IT professionals, marketers, and technology vendors concerned with specific topics and often shows major trends in technology interest throughout the technologies’ life cycle.

So what have we seen for the Web 2.0/Social media market? Though the arguments about what to call the market — consisting of blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, widgets, etc. — have mostly faded away, what people call the market is no more settled than it was 3 or 4 years ago. The big shift: a move away from “Web 2.0″ and a move towards “social media” or even more frustratingly towards “social networking” as a overarching category (not pictured below).

The change has been occurring slowly over the last year or so, with the phrase Web 2.0 hitting its peak among Forrester’s clients in Q2 2008, and falling off from there. From my point of view Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s effort to evolve the phrase into “Web Squared” is effort well spent; Web 2.0 had been getting stale and had lost its cachet.

One final note for the Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts out there, that phrase has clearly not caught on with Forrester’s clients yet at all. Partly this is due to the fact that — for reasons I don’t want to get into  — Forrester resisted using the phrase for the last couple of years, and partly because Forrester clients interested in Enterprise 2.0 topics also use the phrase social media. It makes life mighty confusing for our inquiry team whose job it is to route the questions to the right analysts.

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I’m loath to use this blog to just complain about things that annoy me, but this is one that REALLY annoys me. For some reason in the last couple of weeks the Wall Street Journal has taken to publishing a new RSS entry every time an article is updated. This has been bearable so far, but this morning I was faced with at least 20 different entries pointing to the same Yahoo!/Microsoft search deal (see below). I have yet to unsubscribe completely, but am thinking very hard about it.

For marketers there is a clear lesson: RSS, and social media in general, have a very low switching cost for users. A simple click and I’m gone. If you spam users, get too “salesy”, or get too far off topic users can easily move on to something else. The reward of an engaged audience can be high, but the risk of alienating them, or tripping over your own feet is high as well. Experiment, but be careful.

For The Wall Street Journal, please, for the love of God, fix your RSS feeds!

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Now that hockey and basketball have officially closed up shop I’m starting to tune back into baseball and have been pleased to find my Tigers in first place — in the worst division in baseball, but hey, I’ll take it. Its been quite a few years since I have lived in Detroit, so when the Tigers are in town I try to get to as many games as I can. When they aren’t I spend my time going to Giants and A’s games mostly when the weather is nice, a couple of top shelf pitchers are going, or I just need a baseball fix.

Tonight I’m going to see Randy Johnson. I’ve never had the opportunity to see The Big Unit in person and I am looking forward to catching one of the games best pitchers before he retires — even if he’s not quite as intimidating as he used to be. So, as per usual I went over to StubHub to find tickets. Now, in my view, StubHub is the best place to find tickets for the simple fact that it has an interactive map of what tickets are available (why Ticketmaster can’t seem to figure out this technology is beyond me). So, in just a few minutes I found tickets and was ready to roll.

So I clicked “purchase” and logged in. What did I find next in my purchase process, why the screen shot below (you may need to click in to see exactly what has gone wrong).

Now, I am a big fan of site analytics. Anything you can do to get a better understanding of how your website is working or how satisfied your users are is worth the effort. But I have to question placing the popup one-third of the way through my purchase! Now I know, the ForeSee popup is random, but come on guys, how hard is it to hold the survey until after I’ve completed what I actually came to the site to do. My guess is if you can hold on just a few more clicks you’ll get a considerably more response.

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Just in case you can’t get enough of me, my colleague Tom Grant recently interviewed me for a Podcast for his blog The Heretech where we talk about marketing, B2B social media, and trash on the East Coast. All in all it was a fun 15 minutes.

If you want to skip to where things get a little “off-topic” jump to 10:33 and listen on. You will be treated to Tom trying to claim that he can understand the suffering of Lions fans as a 49ers fan, me disabusing him of that notion, a short discussion of driving habits by geography, and why the pace of the West Coast feels about right.

The Heretech Podcast

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A few months ago I went looking for technology vendor Facebook applications and found one from Microsoft that had just launched: Microphone. At the time there was not much activity, but I recently checked back in and was impressed with (at least parts) of what I found there. Now, I should admit that I am grading on a curve here; most of the apps I found were miserable, like this one from HP.

So what about the Microsoft app works?

First, the entire application has a gaming element to it and they award prizes to the most active users. Time and time again we see that these sorts of competitive games resonate with users and Microsoft has done a nice job of taking advantage — if you notice the leader board is monthly, so no one should feel completely frozen out.

Second, they have taken steps to incorporate other social networks and communications tools like Twitter. Microsoft has taken good advantage of a SocialEyes application to scrape Twitter and bring the conversation into Facebook (see below). I’ve actually never heard of this company but LOVE the approach; has anyone out there worked with them in the past?

Third, they have focused on tangible business functions like market research. A lot of companies have made forays into Facebook, Twitter, and other communities over the last few years and thus far few have real tangible business value to show for it. With this implementation Microsoft has done a great job of keeping their feet firmly planted on solid ground, focusing on customer care and market research. I am likely a bit biased by the fact that I am a market researcher, but this aspect of the application is especially well thought out. For example we see Microsoft measuring customer reaction to recent television ads (see below). Admittedly this is not a substitute for real quantitative market research, since anyone adding the Microsoft Microphone application is likely a bit biased in the first place, but if done right it can provide solid directional data at almost no cost. The poll question about joining a programming competition is spot on — you already have a group likely to participate and this can be a great way to get their input.

Now, I would lose my analyst card if I didn’t lob at least one stone at Microsoft and this one (at least for me) is a doozy. Look closely at the Apple and PC TV ad questions. Notice anything? Oh yes, they inverted the scale from one to the other, starting the Apple ad scale at “Hate it” and forcing people to keep reading if they don’t hate it. For the PC ad they start at “Love it” and head back the other direction. Subtle, but a MAJOR problem if you are looking for objective research! Then again, maybe the marketing guys were looking to show some success to management, in which case, carry on gentlemen.

All things considered this is one of the best vendor Facebook applications I’ve seen and it should serve as a pretty good model for others, even those selling B2B — know your audience, provide them some value, provide them an engaging experience, and keep it grounded in real business needs.

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My colleague Josh Bernoff just blogged the opening of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards. The entry forms are now live and waiting for you! The big change this year is that we are now taking B2B entries as a stand-alone category. So, if you have a great social media implementation or a client you are proud of we are looking forward to your entry.

Here are the instruction courtesy of Josh:

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Yesterday B.L. Ochman over at Advertising Age [UPDATE: Ochman is an independent blogger at What's Next and cross-posted to Ad Age. Sorry for the confusion] published a pretty good list of the Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet. The list has some obvious reasons – “1. You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy,” “8. You want to protect your updates” – as well as some useful reminders of things to avoid– “2. Every tweet has to be approved by legal,” “7. You think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you.”

There were a few, however, that left me scratching my head. First, #3: You plan to use Twitter for nothing but broadcasting headlines or deals. This scenario is a popular one among companies as well as bloggers, and has good traction among users. Case in point: DellHomeOffers and Dell Outlet. The main draw in both cases are deals, plain and simple. While the venerable Dell Outlet does respond to questions directly and offers to help users, I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and hypothesize that of the 297,883 followers Dell Outlet has generated, maybe 200-300 follow for the non-deal content. The newer DellHomeOffers is deal content, plain and simple.

Last week Jeff Nolan wrote an interesting blog post titled Is Twitter Killing RSS? While killing is a bit over the top, I think the short answer is yes. Many companies in high tech products are finding that it is very easy and convenient to dump blog, wiki, discussion forum, and other content right into Twitter where more people will find and read it. Just keep an eye out for the telltale sign: from twitterfeed.

Next, #6: You think Tweeting as XYZ Corp. and using the company logo as your avatar might be a good idea. Organic conversations between real employees and customers is clearly laudable, and is typically the goal of a social media initiative. However, it’s clear there are some cases where customers want and need to connect with a “company.” Comcast Cares? While Frank Eliason, the main force behind the initiative, clearly identifies himself and does not claim to speak as “Comcast” it’s no mistake that his Twitter handle is not FrankEliason.

Further, look at Colonel Tribune, the mascot of the Chicago Tribune company. This fictional character does a nice job of aggregating content relevant to anyone living in or interested in Chicago and accretes value back to the newspaper, not an individual employee.

And what happens if you take a hands off approach to its logical conclusion? We end up with what has happened at Cisco and HP: practically every employee with internet access has set up a semi-official account, fragmenting the user base, and decreasing the overall corporate value. Its no shock that both companies are now working to rationalize the mess. Does it make sense to have one single account? No more than it makes sense to have one single company blog. But to let the gates swing wide open and declare you should not have an official corporate presence is reckless.

Finally, #9: You plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Ochman’s point here is not 100% clear, as it is difficult to tell if she is advising against tracking or against tracking with Google Analytics. But for the sake of discussion, lets assume the worst: That you should not bother tracking the impact of your Twitter initiative.

Well, no shocker here, this one is far from a best practice. Yes, the analytics are pretty poor today, and a simple analysis of followers alone is missing the point, however just letting it fly and hoping for the best is a quick path to frustration and, eventually, your CMO asking what all this effort has amounted to. Thankfully the usual suspects are working to provide a programmatic approach to Twitter analytics – WebTrends and Radian6 announced a new offering to do just that.

All in all, it was a very useful list and I recommend the read. Of course with a few caveats!

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The biggest news in the tech industry the past week has been the rumored IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Like everyone else who follows the tech industry I have spent more than a few hours trying to get my head around all the competitive implications. Needless to say the rumor has made for some interesting hallway conversations, not to mention some lively debates among analysts in the office.

At the same time I have been finalizing the material for the B2B Social Media workshop my colleague Laura Ramos and I will be conducting tomorrow in Foster City, and next month in Orlando. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice I have a lot of Sun examples of social media done right. IBM holds it’s own, but in the tech industry specifically Sun and Dell are the poster children of social media marketing, and both have been struggling mightily.

A couple of years ago I was on a panel with Toby Redshaw of Motorola, who in the course of discussion confidently declared that the only way to get a Web 2.0 initiative off the ground was to fire the CEO. Since then I have seen just that over and over again: the firms looking to implement Web 2.0 tools for social media marketing — as well as employee collaboration and productivity — are those with a “motivated” CEO, typically one who is fresh on the job. The CEO fresh on the job does not typically find himself at the most successful company.

Which brings us back to Sun and IBM. Let’s take a quick look at their homepages as they stood in August of 2008 (the orange boxes are mine). Notice anything? One has community and social media all over the place while the other offers just a hint. So which one is acquiring which? And is this more than just coincidence?

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The first full report from our recent survey of how business technology buyers use social media is now officially on the Forrester website. Its available to all Forrester clients, but if you are not a client here are some of the highlights:

The big takeaway: Technology buyers are highly socially active, the most active we have seen so far. Many technology vendors have been on the leading edge of social media marketing for some time (Dell and IBM come to top of mind) and for good reason. IT buyers — both in the IT department and within the line of business are highly engaged with social media, and use blogs, discussion forums, and rich media in many technology purchase processes.

What’s really exciting however is the difference between social activity overall, and social activity for business — or as we have been calling it in the office “puppies vs. servers.” So far puppies are still far more popular than servers but its not too far off. We expected a drop, but for technology buyers personal behavior really seems to translate into business behavior. We expect that trend to only grow over time.

If you’ve been reading this blog you know this research is a cornerstone of my and Laura Ramos’ agenda for the coming year so get ready for more to come! In the meantime, you can catch up with all the details of our first report by downloading the audio and slides from our recent Webinar, or checking out the slides embedded below.

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