Justin Kistner hits home run with Facebook Marketing Presentation

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• Social Media
• February 12, 2010

I first met Justin Kistner when he was flown over from Portland, Oregan with the rest of the WebTrends crew to talk at Engage 2010 (London).  He is certainly someone that really GETS social media, its position in business and the marketing mix and more importantly the measurement of it.  I’ve linked to his presentation

This is the presentation he gave at Engage 2010 in New Orleans which concentrates on Facebook marketing.  Now I’m all for dissemination of information and having more channels to communicate with customers on.  However, is there a simple way of determine return on investment (ROI). Well in short no!

You can count all the referrals and use visitor history to attribute sales to ‘facebook.com’ or ‘twitter’ or ‘linkedin’ etc.    However, this isn’t the only way!  What about the ‘halo effect’, that is the mere prescence of a brand awareness campaign on Facebook or the usage of Facebook as a communications channel.  Which will generate more sales!  This cannot be measured effectively and any attribution is guesswork (educated guesswork) at best.

The presentation goes on to show that “93% of customers think that a company should have a social media presence”, well surely that would depend on what your target audience is.  I’m sure that Saga (specialist insurers for the over 50s) wouldn’t be that interested in spending massive amounts of money on social media when their target audience has been educated to understand direct mailings.

Forrester is also quoted in this presentation and they have defined the new media landscape.  Separating media type into paid, owned and earned.  Which do you think is going to be more valuable?  Google earns a helluva lot of money from sponsored search terms and ad placements, however, if this was going to be the future of customer communications and marketing, why build Buzz?  Its because Facebook has generated a massive following and shown success in growing customers as a commodity.  The customer’s decision is heavily influenced by what their friends say about a product or service (or in some nasty situations cyberbullying), the brand has no control over this.  Its hard to measure but, is the most credible and most honest channel for selling / raising awareness.

Anyone with a big enough budget can monopolise key paid search terms or create a site which is tailored / optimised for leveraging search engine optimisation benefits.  However, getting customers to endorse your brands by signing up to your groups on facebook is invaluable!….

Some interesting facts from Nielson:

• 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology
• 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks
• visiting social sites is ahead of personal email as the 4th most popular online activity
• and, its growing at three times the rate of the overall internet

So we’re not dealing with something that is a ‘well try it and see’ facebook (and social marketing) is fast becoming an essential component in any marketing strategy.  Which business (no matter what sector, no matter what targeted marketed) would be mad not to take a serious look at this opportunity (and yes TargetStone can help!).  Facebook has recently reported via their press page that they have over 400 million members of which 50% log in every day.   Mobile statistics – 100 million mobile Facebook users and they are “twice as active as non-mobile users”.

For those of you that are interested in hearing more about him, you can follow Justin on twitter @justinkistner.

Related Posts:

Econsultancy – Social Media and Online PR Report – November 2009

Search Engine Watch – Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Communication Strategies Facebook Justin Kistner Social Media