New research shows how social media is changing shopping behavior.

It’s no secret that social media is one of the hottest topics on marketers’ radars. What isn’t widely known is how to use social-media contacts to drive sales directly.

People of all ages are using social-networking sites and other user-generated content platforms at astonishing rates, and brands are scrambling to create social-media strategies both as part of their overall marketing and in isolation.

In fact, Forrester Research estimates that social-media marketing budgets will grow 34 percent per year from 2009 to 2014 — faster than any other form of online advertising. Moreover, within five years, social media budgets will be larger than those for both mobile and email marketing activities.

Despite all of this increased attention and spending, we actually know very little about what is perhaps the most critical factor in achieving positive ROI through social-media marketing: How people’s behavior in shopping for and buying products is impacted by social media.

Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide recently fielded a research study that uncovers this connection. More than 3,500 online U.S. respondents completed interviews about media contacts that they may have in their shopping experiences across 10 product categories.

Then, 500 respondents who had experienced social media brand contact during a shopping experience (called “Social-Media Shoppers”) and 500 respondents who had not (“Non-Social Media Shoppers”) completed a follow-up interview that delved more deeply into shopping behaviors and attitudes. This provided the opportunity to identify the differences and similarities between these two groups of people.

It’s big and growing: There are 95 million social-media shoppers in the United States. More than 40 percent of U.S. adults are using social media in their shopping experiences, and this trend appears likely to continue. When asked how often social media is used in shopping versus a year ago, almost 30 percent said they are using it more, while three percent said they are using it less.

Currently, social-media contacts are made in a variety of forums. For 35 percent of shoppers, the process includes — or starts with — online search. What’s surprising is that 30 percent read user reviews on retailer websites as a part of the shopping process.

So, who are these social-media shoppers? They come from all walks of life, but the study uncovered a heightened relationship between age, education level and the use of social media in shopping. As expected, because they’ve grown up using technology, people under 35 and those holding college degrees are most likely to be social-media shoppers.

Interestingly, the study also revealed that social-media shoppers are not necessarily very “actively social.” Only about one in four social-media shoppers contributes anything to a conversation about a brand or product; the rest view content posted by others. So, a very small group influences a very large group.

Social-media shoppers are more engaged with media and spend more time shopping. Importantly, shoppers who access social media in their shopping process still use historically prevalent contact channels such as television, radio, magazine, newspaper ads and direct mail, as well. In fact, they tend to engage even more with these channels (see chart one).

Social-media shoppers see more value in the opinions of other everyday people as useful input in their shopping decisions. For example, 39 percent of social-media shoppers strongly agree that they can learn a lot more about a brand by seeing what everyday people are saying about it online versus only 22 percent of non-social media shoppers.

Social-media shoppers have broadened the set of sources they use for validation and are seeking additional information beyond what marketers, manufacturers, and retailers provide.

Incorporating all of these additional social-media sources into shopping takes time. In fact, social-media shoppers are spending a significantly greater amount of time shopping. Their greater time investment does not, however, automatically lead to a similarly significant difference in what they spend.

While other research shows that shoppers gaining information from retailer and manufacturer websites are likely to buy more expensive featured products, we find that social-media shoppers are only a bit more likely to spend more (see chart two).

Social media impacts behavior throughout the shopping process. Television, print, magazine, direct mail and online research brand contacts are most likely to take place at the beginning, and in-store contacts tend to spike at the end of the shopping process, but social media holds steady throughout (see chart three). This suggests social media needs to play multiple roles in shopping as they are tapped at many stages during the path-to-purchase.

Social brand-contacts are a communal activity. To reveal why different types of media are accessed by shoppers, respondents were asked to rate a series of motivations for using media in their shopping. Creating a perceptual map of findings validated two obvious, but unproven, benefits of using social media in shopping.

Specifically, social media enables shoppers to gather the impressions and analysis of others while channels such as television, print and radio allow them to form their own impressions and analysis (see chart four). This introduces a significant point regarding the “wisdom of the crowd.”

With so few people actually contributing to the conversation, the early adopters and posters have a heavily weighted influence on the message. Their impact is the greatest and can become self-perpetuating.

Social media’s impact on shopping varies widely by category. Nearly 50 percent of people shopping for computer hardware/software and books are likely to incorporate social media into the shopping process. With greater purchase risk and reward, greater value is given to the opinions and advice of others.

In contrast, only nine percent of people shopping for laundry detergent and soft drinks are likely to use social media. Conventional wisdom might suggest this is because people don’t seek peer reinforcement when buying lower-involvement, commodity-type products.

However, an argument could be made that engagement with social media contacts in such categories is low simply because those contacts aren’t as readily accessible or heavily promoted. If true, this presents a ripe opportunity for both brands and retailers.

What This Means

It’s clear that it’s not enough for brands simply to have a social-media presence — a Facebook fan page, Twitter account or corporate blog, for example. If brands truly want to connect with shoppers and impact their ultimate purchase decisions using social contacts, they must develop strategies that continually engage with shoppers throughout the process.

Although the “right” approach will undoubtedly vary from brand to brand, here are a few guiding principles that marketers can refer to when devising their social-media plans:

 • Monitor constantly, listen early and respond regularly. People are constantly talking about brands (on social-networking sites, blogs or ratings/reviews sites, etc.), to the tune of hundreds of thousands of conversations per day.

As a result, much like Best Buy with its @Twelpforce Twitter account, brands should: Monitor social media chatter with regularity; listen in real time to consumer comments (both positive and negative); incorporate that feedback into their marketing activities; provide answers and advice; and, when appropriate, engage people in further conversation.

• Facilitate conversation, don’t force it. Contrary to the practices of many marketers, blasting brand announcements and promotions to people via Facebook and Twitter does not constitute a viable social-media plan. As the research suggests, shoppers rely on social-media contacts to seek out the opinions of others.

To that end, brands need to provide tools — both on and off their sites — that facilitate conversations amongst shoppers and allow them to share information with each other in as turnkey a way as possible. Jansport’s integration of Facebook Connect into its onsite shopping experience is just one best-in-class example.

• Assess your competition. Brands can monitor social channels to determine how their competitors are using social media and the size/impact of their presence. Consider how their brand is being perceived versus yours, and why.

• Integrate social media into the broader communication strategy. The fact that social-media shoppers are supplementing, not replacing, other media contacts during the shopping process reinforces the importance of developing fully-integrated communication strategies.

Brands must ensure that their social-media messages are consistent with what people are exposed to on television, in print, in stores and elsewhere online, and that they’re encouraging cross-channel behavior.

Walgreens, for example, created a Facebook application that allows users to print and pick up their Facebook photos at local stores, and promotes that application through various print and online media.

Don’t think of social media as a campaign. Social media lives and breathes.

Engaging advocates to drive word-of-mouth to increase brand loyalty requires constant fuel, participation and management. 

Via | Mastercom blog

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

U.S. Growth in Average time Person on Facebook and Twitter Outpaces Growth of Overall Category
People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009. Year-over-year growth in average time spent by U.S. users, for both Facebook and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth for the category, increasing 200% and 368%, respectively. Among, the top five U.S. social networking sites, Twitter.com continued its reign as the fastest-growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors, increasing 579% year-over-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. However, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%

Australia Leads in Average Time Spent per Person on Social Media Sites in December
When narrowed by individual country, with 142.1 million unique visitors the United States had the largest number of social media and blog users in December, followed by Japan, which had 46.6 million unique visitors during the month. Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December. The United States and the United Kingdom came in a close second and third, with 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 8 minutes, respectively.

*Global data takes into account the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy

La debacle que arrastró a muchas compañías de Estados Unidos, dio lugar a la fusión entre algunas empresas de peso global y provocó que fuertes competidoras hoy apenas puedan sobrevivir.

Para un grupo de expertos de la consultora Deloitte, quienes realizaron un profundo informe sobre las automotrices y sus perspectivas hacia 2010, "el resultado de este proceso, que aún no terminó de definirse, produjo profundos cambios estructurales".

"Los países con exportaciones a costos elevados verán disminuir la capacidad doméstica, a medida que la producción de vehículos continúe emigrando a las "nuevas Detroits"; es decir, centros de bajos costos de producción esparcidos por India y China, y otros lugares de libre comercio", sintetizaron.

En este nuevo escenario, habrá varios cambios que serán fundamentales para sobrevivir. Uno de ellos, y el más importante, es el diseño e implementación de plataformas globales de alto volumen, que permitan resistir a las altas presiones competitivas.

Transformaciones
La industria arrastra grandes adelantos en los últimos años. Hoy los automóviles son más seguros y tienen mayor rendimiento en relación al combustible.

Los fabricantes sufren cada vez más presiones, tanto competitivas como financieras ; mientras los clientes buscan incentivos económicos para decidir la compra.

Y, en este contexto, la pregunta hoy es: ¿Cómo será el desarrollo de la industria automotriz a medida que el mundo emerja de la crisis? Y aquí aparecen los nuevos protagonistas.

"Un fuerte cambio en el escenario competitivo verá a China e India surgiendo como los grandes jugadores de la industria . Sus mercados se unirán a los de Europa Occidental, Japón, Corea y los Estados Unidos para conformar centros de diseño y de producción", explican en Deloitte.

Para 2020 alrededor de no más de 10 de estos centros, con seis grandes mercados, dominarían el 90% de las ventas mundiales . Para mantener la competitividad, cada uno de ellos contará con plataformas globales de mayor volumen respaldadas por centros de diseño en red en los mercados emergentes clave.

Nuevo foco
Esta nueva radiografía del sector viene acompañada de una realidad impensada hace algunos años, que tiene que ver con la crisis de Detroit, lugar que fuera históricamente la sede de las grandes automotrices del mundo. La declinación del mercado en ventas en los últimos tres años produjo capacidad ociosa en las plantas a nivel mundial, incluyendo Norte América y la Unión Europea.

La primera señal de que se avecinaba un profundo cambio de contexto vino justamente desde Detroit . "Luego de haber sido alguna vez el núcleo de la industria automotriz global, su influencia ha declinado incesantemente durante las últimas décadas", comentaron en Deloitte.

Lo peor, además de este fracaso, es que ya ha perdido su liderazgo en ingeniería. Por ejemplo, la mayoría de los automóviles fabricados desde 2007 tuvieron su desarrollo principal en Asia y en Europa, y se estima que esta tendencia continuará hasta el 2015.

Bajos Costos
Mientras se hunden las grandes marcas y los países con exportaciones a costos elevados están sufriendo el cierre de la capacidad doméstica, la producción de vehículos continúa emigrando a los centros de bajos costos de producción, como India y China.

Costo y demanda serán las dos claves para alcanzar el liderazgo, ya que el costo de la fuerza laboral en mercados emergentes seguirá siendo menor que en el mundo desarrollado.

Al mismo tiempo, y para aprovechar la expansión de la población, los centros de producción continuarán trasladando una parte de su trabajo a mercados emergentes, para así estar más cerca de su gran fuente de nuevos clientes. Por ejemplo, China y Sud América representarán más del 50% del crecimiento de la producción global de vehículos livianos entre 2008 y 2015.

"A medida que aumenta el volumen de autos vendidos en los mercados de países en desarrollo, los fabricantes necesitarán cada vez estar más cerca de los centros de demanda", explicó RC Bhargava, Presidente de Maruti Suzuki India.

Y agregó que "esto será axial por razones de competencia, que son más fuertes que las razones de bajo costo."

Otro gran objetivo será equilibrar la cobertura geográfica de su producción y ventas a fin de reducir la exposición a cambios adversos en las cotizaciones de las monedas.

El efecto global de este cambio es que, conforme transcurra esta década, habrá menores ventas de automóviles importados desde afuera de una zona comercial.

"Los nuevos bolsones de áreas de bajo costo de cada región darán la bienvenida a los fabricantes" explicaron en Deloitte.

Esta estrategia ya esta en desarrollo. Por ejemplo:

• Suzuki estableció plantas en Hungría para proveer a la Unión Europea. 
• Volskswagen y Nissan fabrican en México para proveer a los países miembros del NAFTA.
• Renault está construyendo una plantea de montaje en Marruecos para fabricar automóviles, con base Logan para realizar exportaciones globales principalmente a Europa, comenzando en 2010.

China en movimiento
Si bien los chinos serán clave en este nuevo proceso, antes que una compañía de ese país se establezca como productor global líder, la industria deberá pasar por un período de consolidación interna. Esto se debe dar para revertir la débil posición en el mercado mundial de los centros de producción chinos.

Para lograrlo, el gobierno chino planifica fusionar en el futuro cercano a las 14 mas grandes automotrices locales solo en 10 compañías , con una participación en el mercado doméstico superior al 90 por ciento.

Entre las 10 primeras, la directiva del Gobierno es que apenas dos o tres logren una producción anual de dos millones de unidades. Se espera que en la mayoría de los segmentos la base de aprovisionamiento se consolide de un 30 a un 50 por ciento.

Además alienta a los fabricantes de automóviles a desarrollar sus propias marcas con el propósito de fomentar la participación de las automotrices chinas para participar al menos en un 40% del mercado nacional.

Los centros de fabricación a nivel global representan más del 77% de la producción global. Hay cambios notables como el hecho de que Fiat ha absorbido a Chrysler y Volkswagen se ha deglutido a Porsche.

"Transacciones de este tipo incrementan la escala, simplifican la distribución, promueven la eficiencia del capital y permiten el acceso a mercados anteriormente limitados", definieron en Deloitte.

Por otro lado, se estima que aparecerá una nueva raza de jugadores, como así también un nuevo equilibrio global , con competidores basados en centros de fabricación, particularmente de India y China.

Cuando los acuerdos se hayan completado, el escenario estará dominado por productores globales y proveedores basados en seis grandes mercados: Europa Occidental, Japón, Estados Unidos, Corea, China e India.

La Alianza Renault-Nissan podría ser un modelo para aquellos que estén buscando plataforma de producción y aprovisionamiento a escala, pero que no quieran arriesgarse al desafío de una integración total.

Para seguir siendo competitivos en sus costos, los centros de producción comenzaron a reducir la cantidad de plataformas, en las que producen y están logrando una mayor diversidad de modelos en cada una.

Un caso es el de Honda, que con su plataforma común flexible, desarrolló tres versiones dimensionalmente distintas del Accord , logrando diseños únicos en el mercado donde el 60% de los componentes son comunes.

También para continuar siendo competitivos y mantener controles de calidad centralizados en mercados emergentes en rápido crecimiento, los centros de diseños regionales deberán formar parte de redes globalizadas.

Vía | iProfesional.com

One of the chief things that managers seem to want is the ability to draw lines and connect dots between their social media participation and sales (or other conversion metrics). There are two ways to do that, and one is much more difficult than the other.

Cause and Correlation

First is attribution or direct cause, which would indicate that the social media initative is the sales channel itself. Much like Dell claiming that it has reaped millions in sales via their Twitter channel, here you’re saying that your endeavors in one channel or another are the primary driver for a particular revenue stream. The tricky bit here is that

• a) there will *always* be external factors that influence sales transactions and
  
• b) you have to track and control how you output information in these specific channels in order to accurately attribute the revenue.

Moreover, Dell was successful here because they’d built up a platform of trust and familiarity over a long time, across several other channels: their blogs, IdeaStorm, their more support-focused Twitter presence(s), and their longstanding e-commerce. They had an entire ecosystem of social media presence working in their favor here, and many businesses don’t yet have the track record, the deployment, or the commitment to replicate that. That’s what makes direct sales through social media such a sticky wicket.

The second and more realistic way to track the impact of social media on revenue is by correlation. In other words, you track your sales in aggregate, or perhaps in the more global online environment (inclusive of your website and how leads funnel into your pipeline through the web overall).

Then, you overlay trends in your online activity – say, the establishment of your community or the building of your blog – and look at them alongside your sales activity. If they go up together, you can indicate a positive correlation, or the likelihood that the social media stuff is helping to drive the sales. If social media activity goes up but the sales stay flat or go down, something isn’t working, or the social media bit isn’t effective from a sales standpoint.

Likewise, correlation can also be in *ratios*, so for example, a $50,000 investment in social media (including time, money, or both) correlates with a $25,000 increase in sales over the same time period. Note that this is NOT precise ROI, because you’re talking an investment in a single channel against TOTAL sales. But you can look at the proportion in sales or lead traffic increase over the time period in which you track your social media activities, and extract a relationship between the two.

So. With all of that nuance out of the way, let’s look at a few of the things you might measure, in detail.

Value Per Fan/Follower

Quick distinction here: if you want to track the value of a fan/follower in monetary terms, you have to be attributing that value to revenue in the same channel. So if you want to establish the dollar value of a Facebook fan, you need to be tracking the revenue generated via leads and traffic originating from your Facebook efforts. (If you’re trying to establish the more intrinsic value of a fan in brand value or other qualitative terms, that’s different and more complex). That means, in a simplistic fashion:

• Build in landing pages for your website that are only accessible via a specific URL not accessible from anywhere else on your site.
• Use that URL to generate unique parameters through your analytics software (Google URL Builder or parameter tools in your paid platform), and use shortened links based on those URLs that are unique to the landing pages you’ve designed for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Keep them separate when sharing them, and track which ones you use when and where. You can use a spreadsheet for that.
• Use your analytics software to track referral traffic that originates on the specific social network you want to track, either by generic url (like Twitter.com) or through the unique links/landing pages you’ve set up, or the aggregate of both.
• Look at the percentage of either conversions to leads from that referral traffic (i.e, they filled out your contact form or emailed you for more information), and then through your sales/CRM database, track which ones become customers.
• OR, if you have ecommerce on your site, track the completed transactions that originate from those referral sites.
• Take the total revenue generated in a 30 day period from these traffic paths, and divide it by the number of fans you have at the end of that same 30 day period to arrive at an *approximate* dollar value per fan or follower. Remember that this number will change as the ratio of revenue to potential reach changes.

Note that this is attempting to say that the value of a fan or follower is *directly* tied to the revenue produced by that social network. It doesn’t take into account factors like business those fans may do with you offline (and therefore influencing the larger sales picture), those that have combined online experiences with you through several channels (because in this case their revenue would be attributed to single behaviors), or things like brand lift, reputation, awareness, or reach (which we covered yesterday).

You may wish to take a more holistic approach to this if you have the means and the (significant) time: cross referencing your fan and follower lists with your sales database, and looking at their sales volume/value over a quarter or a year.

Then, if you compare the annual value of a customer who overlaps with your social media efforts against customers who are NOT part of those followings, you can compare and see if there’s a difference. In this case, you’d be saying that a customer who is ALSO connected with you on social networks is worth X amount more in a given time period to your business.

It’s a bigger picture metric, but in my mind, perhaps more valuable since you’re looking at the social media picture more strategically.

Lead Generation

Here, you need to do a lot of pathing and tracking from the contacts that originate on social networks and make it somehow into your pipeline. Whether you’re using a spreadsheet to keep track of your database or a sophisticated CRM system, you’ll want a way to designate a lead source, and tag it in a way that you can reference later. If you have the time and energy, you can even split that source into specific social channels: blog subscribers, Twitter, LinkedIn contacts, etc. For example:

• For email leads that come in, if the source is obvious (i.e. I found you on Twitter), tag it as such. If not, consider asking in your reply.
• Include a field on your contact/website form that asks people how they found you and include your social presences.
• Tag leads that come in from offline events that tie to your social networking efforts, like Tweetups or conferences
• Path referral traffic to your site from social network URLs and map a contact form submission or clicking on a “Contact Us” email link as a conversion to a lead, and track accordingly
• Track direct leads from unique URLs and lead capture landing pages with the social networks they were shared on.
• Track requests for content downloads behind email signups that are shared on social networks. Do the unique URL trick for the links on separate networks, too, to get a better idea of where the downloads are coming from.
• Overlay names on your fan list with your lead pipeline (hint: If you do this from the start and do it on a regular basis, it’s much easier to handle just the new stuff as it comes in and cross reference accordingly).
• Cross reference names in your community membership database with those in your lead pipeline.

The first thing to do is look at these in total. How many leads do you generate each month that are somehow tagged with a social media-related source? What percentage are they of your overall lead pipeline?

For the last two or similar efforts with other social networks (or, say, your blog email subscriber list), you can look at how many leads per month you generate that are unique to those channels and give a percentage (for every 25 LinkedIn Group members we have, we get an average of 3 leads per month). A twist: look at leads that have languished or aged in your database and are inactive, and which might be reactivated via a social media touchpoint.

Something else to consider is lead stages; many CRM platforms allow you to track the lead stages themselves, whether it’s brand new, or whether they’re in deeper consideration and talks with your sales team (B2B folks, this is for you). You can also now look at the leads that originate in social networks and see how they’re distributed across those stages over time.

Conversion Rates

Leads are great, but what we want, ultimately, is action of some kind.

The real value here is in looking not at each channel (blog, Twitter, Facebook), but at the aggregate of all social media efforts. And conversion doesn’t have to mean sales; it can mean anything you would qualify as a successful interaction according to your goals: email newsletter signup, blog subscription, contact form submission, content download, contest entry, or of course a purchase.

The hypothesis for that is that your social media approach should be strategic overall, so that you aren’t looking at one specific tactic (i.e. your community platform) but the aggregate of all of them.

• Track the website traffic from social networks using some of the methods above: unique URLs shared on social networks, web analytics.This is the key step, because you want to isolate as much as possible the traffic that comes from your social networks.
• In your analytics platform, learn how to set up conversion criteria. For example, in Google Analytics, you can set up Goals, which are essentially specific landing pages on your site that indicate to you that someone has fulfilled what you want them to do. That could be a purchase receipt, submission confirmation, or  “thanks for signing up” page for your newsletter  page.
• Look at the percentage of conversions that originate from social network URL referrals vs. other sources (like search or direct traffic).

Cool thing (and blatant plug for my company): Radian6 has an integration that combines WebTrends analytics with our social media tracking and measurement. It allows you to look at specific pieces of content on the web – including ones that you didn’t create – and see how many of them actually drove traffic and conversions on your website. You’ve got to have WebTrends and do some setup of conversion criteria and tracking codes on your website, but MAN is it cool when it comes together. The fusion of social media and web analytics is going to be really key in the future of social media measurement.
Another way to look at this is conversion of leads to sales that have a social network affiliation or touchpoint with you, but that didn’t necessarily originate there.

• When a lead comes in through any channel, cross reference it with your email subscribers for your blog, twitter list, or facebook fans. (Don’t have a database specific to people in your social media audiences? This might be a good reason to start building it).
• Indicate the association(s) in your database
• Look at the conversion percentage of those that have social network associations vs. those that do not.
• The overall percentage/value difference can be positively correlated to social network activity.
• Bonus: do leads associated with your social networks convert to sales more quickly or more slowly than those that aren’t? That would be time from the date the lead is opened in your database to the date of sale.

Like we discussed above, this is more looking at the potential influence of social media participation on a prospect’s buying likelihood and overall transaction value.

Direct Response Sales

The key to this is very simple: you have to provide a unique mechanism for people to buy from you that is exclusive to either all of your social media channels, or specific ones if you’re targeting individual communities. This is what Dell did, with specific deals that were only available to Twitter.

That can be a promotional code you distribute only inside your online community, a specific and unique landing page you create only for your Twitter followers, or a coupon only available to your Facebook fans (and that they can share with their friends, perhaps). Then, you have to deliberately and carefully track the sales that are generated through those initiatives.

This is one place you can calculate true ROI, or the monetary return on your investment in something. You’d have to:

• Account for the time and expenses you put into a specific social media effort, such as your Facebook fan page. That means people hours, costs for infrastructure, and a percentage of overhead that’s relative to the time and human capital investment.
• Account for the direct sales that come from that effort, by tracking them as specifically as possible.
• Take the sales, subtract the cost, divide the resulting number (the net profit) by the cost figure again, and get a decimal figure. Multiply it by 100 to get a percentage. A positive percentage means that you made more than you spent, or a positive ROI.

Keep something in mind though: information on the internet is rarely without bleed into other avenues. I can get a code on Facebook, email it to 10 of my friends, and they can use it too. I can share a specific Twitter link off Twitter, and instead to my friends on Yammer at work.  Or I can retweet it, and therefore it’s not just sales via your Twitter followers, but the Twitter community overall.

The point here is to evaluate the sales not as only initiating (or caused) from the specific social network, but as a result of your presence on that network (because people will see it there first, and if they share, you have extended reach). See the difference?

Wrapping Up

You’ve no doubt noted the heavy burden we’re putting on web analytics as a part of the measurement equation and there are several valid reasons for that.

First, web analytics have had a longer time to mature, and are a very solid indicator of active behaviors on a critical element of your online strategy (or at least it should be): your website. Second, it’s home base for you, and since social media is an online thing, a hefty chunk of your results and actions are also likely to occur online.

Are their offline indicators of social media success? Sure. You can track them, too, if you’re diligent enough to connect the dots (i.e. finding out how many of your event attendees also follow you on Twitter, even if they bought their ticket elsewhere). But remember this.

Measuring itself is not the goal. Don’t get stuck in the rabbit hole of trying to track everything that’s interesting. Track the stuff that helps you realize if you’re edging toward your goals, in this case goals that align with lead gen, online activities, or sales through online channels. You want a reasonable level of confidence that what you’re doing is having a positive impact, or some data to hint that you might need to adjust your approach.

Few measurements are bulletproof. They’re most often gauges, indicators, signs, and probabilities. Use the measurements to make business decisions, and not the other way around.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about potential cost savings you can track that might be impacted by social media. See you here?

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in  Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
• Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
• Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

La mayor automotriz europea por ventas, que fabrica los autos VW y Audi y tiene entre sus nueve marcas a los autos deportivos de ultralujo Bugatti y los camiones pesados Scania, vendió 6,3 millones de vehículos el año pasado, 19% menos que los 7,8 millones de vehículos vendidos por Toyota.

Volkswagen afirmó que apunta a un margen de ganancias a mediano plazo antes de intereses e impuestos, o EBIT, para el negocio automotor "de por lo menos 5%, sin contar la integración planeada de Porsche Automobil Holding SE en 2011. Su margen EBIT en los primeros nueve meses de 2009 fue de 2%.

Volkswagen prevé un margen de ganancias antes de impuestos superior a 8% para 2018. La empresa afirmó que planea lograr "más recortes significativos de gastos" en los próximos años, en parte a través de la creación de más sinergias entre diferentes líneas de modelos y mayor flexibilidad.

Vía | Noticia al día

If you've got an idea worth spreading, I hope you'll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still...

• You can name your idea anything you like, but a google-friendly name is always better than one that isn't.
• Don't plan on appearing on a reality show as the best way to launch your idea.
• Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you're stalling. You don't wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
• Don't poll your friends. It's your art, not an election.
• Never pay a non-lawyer who promises to get you a patent.
• Avoid powerful people. Great ideas aren't anointed, they spread through a groundswell of support.
• Spamming strangers doesn't work. Spamming friends doesn't work so well either, but it's certainly better than spamming strangers.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.
• Powerful organizations adore the status quo, so expect no help from them if your idea challenges the very thing they adore.
• Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4.
• Be prepared for the Dip.
• Seek out apostles, not partners. People who benefit from spreading your idea, not people who need to own it.
• Keep your overhead low and don't quit your day job until your idea can absorb your time.
• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
• Try not to confuse confidence with delusion.
• Prefer dry, useful but dull ideas to consumer-friendly 'I would buy that' sort of things. A lot less competition and a lot more upside in the long run.
• Pick a budget. Pick a ship date. Honor both. Don't ignore either. No slippage, no overruns.
• Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It's okay if they're not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion.
• Be grateful.
• Rise up to the opportunity, and do the idea justice.