Big Fish, Small Fish: Who will rule the pond in the UK?

A recent survey of office workers in the UK suggests they cost the country’s economy roughly £1.38 billion each year because they spend time on the clock surfing social media networking sites such as Twitter. A consultant for the company that commissioned the report said, “When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole.”

Sound familiar? Maybe reminiscent of the fears people had about email in the work place in 1994? It also sounds eerily like the concern that Internet access in the workplace gave rise to Cyberslacking in 1996. These days, it’s hard to imagine a day at the office without either email or Internet. Yet the fear of new communication technology in the Enterprise has surfaced again in the UK around Twitter. But why?

It certainly is not because of a lack of broadband Internet access. Data published at Internet World Stats shows that a high percentage of both US and UK citizens enjoy Internet connectivity (74.1% and 79.8%, respectively). So, with broadband Internet and tasty low-cost social media marketing dangling within reach, why aren’t UK businesses hungry for the bait?

One contributing factor could be that European businesses are slower to utilize social media applications such as Twitter to promote their companies than US businesses. According to Forrester Research’s Consumer Profile Tool, 82% of US citizens use social networks, compared to 63% of their UK brothers and sisters across the pond. US participants are more actively participating on social networks at every rung in Forrester’s ladder of participation.

Maybe less experience contributed to why a study conducted by Webtrends found that the rate of adopting low-cost social media marketing strategies, specifically Twitter, by Enterprise businesses in the UK was only 2%. These companies know about Twitter, but they might not know what to make of it.  “Many are simply not sure how to use it, and even if they could they wouldn’t be sure of what to say, and who exactly they would be saying it to,” said Webtrends’ marketing director Colette Wade.

The same cannot be said for the small fish competing with the big fish Enterprises. O2 recently did a study that found 17% of small businesses were utilizing Twitter. As bizreport.com put it “Cost-cutting was cited as the biggest benefit of tweeting by two-thirds of those surveyed, with 16% claiming they had saved up to £5,000 (US$7,300) since signing up.”

The 15% gap between Enterprise businesses and small businesses in the UK in their adoption of Twitter to market their companies is substantial! Enterprise “big fish” companies who are slow to see the benefits of social media might find themselves “Amazoned” when their “small fish” competition out-positions them in the marketplace by embracing social media marketing before they do.

It may be the same old pond, but the ecosystem is different. Will the small fish dominate the UK food chain with new media marketing strategies?

Had the clock just struck thirteen? Had I just been subjected to 2 minutes of hate? Was I living in a dystopian society?

The answer to all the above is no—I’m not Winston Smith and the year is not 1984. Phew! But, Big Brother IS following me on Twitter.

The Big Brother I am talking is not the totalitarian state (not is this blog anyway) but of course the successful reality TV show.

WHY?

In the UK certain events quintessentially define British summer time these range from Wimbledon and Royal Ascot to the Glastonbury music festival. Over the last 10 years the phenomenon that is BB has rowdily forced its way into this, creating a televisual feast of reality on our screens 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the entire summer period.

Rewind to the beginning of this years “summer”, Webtrends had just launched social measurement (if you haven’t seen it call your local rep and demand a demo! IT’S AMAZING) and I had been working through some demo ideas to show customers. I chose Big Brother for a topic idea as it has an element of community—stuff happens and the power of social media means that people want to talk about it instantly. One of my initial ideas was to compare traditional summer events with Big Brother and the results are of this are below:

Astonishing, but actually Big Brother gets far more mentions in social media than “traditional” summer events. I just guess sports events haven’t captured the hearts and minds of Twitterers in the same way reality TV has.

During the time of the MP expenses scandal exposed superbly by one of our customers, The Daily Telegraph, one of the housemates called “halfwit” (read here to find out why he is called that) had shown an interest in becoming a politician after the show. So I did a comparison of mentions for that week betwixt him and the major political figures in the UK today:

Amazingly again the housemate, even in these troubled times had more share of voice than the 2 leaders of the opposition parties in the UK and on one day eclipsing the Prime Minister himself!

I also made a conscious effort not to watch the actual TV show itself , but actually use mentions and conversation cloud to understand what had actually gone on within the house.

This sort of fun insight is better shared with the Big Brother community than locked away in a demo, so I started tweeting the outcomes of some of the trends I had discovered and two things happened…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKS2qV1FKVs]

A couple of hours into our customer conference has Twitter a buzz with news. You can scroll through the many pages on Twitter using this search. Below are a couple of choice tweets:

From Forrester social media analyst jowyang: Partnership: Webtrends gets on the social bandwagon and partners with Radian 6 http://bit.ly/WTR6 Radian6 actually has primitive CRM tools (this tweet has been retweeted many times)

From Forrester social media analyst jowyang You see where this is all headed right? The established web analytics, CRM, CMS industries are quickly encroaching upon the social web.

From the Queen of Measurement kdpaine: webternds + @radian6 brings us 1 step closer to the holy grail of measurement @dianelennox can SAS give us a widget to correlate the 2? …

From AdAge Top 150 Marketing Blogger douglaskarr: @michelewarther received my copy! Thanks so much. Very exciting to see the upcoming changes to WebTrends #wte09 esp. Open Exchange

Stay tuned for more updates!

Why Twitter? I Don’t Get It! If you’ve asked that question yourself or heard it from others – This NYTimes article on the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy helps to explain the transformation on tapping the collective consciousness. Personally – I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter and I’d bet many of you feel the same way.

Love that I can keep up with many of my friends and coworkers so that when I see them in person, know a bit more of what is going on with them and we automatically start our conversations at another level. 

Hate that many people, including folks I’ve never met, know more about my day-to-day life than my sister who lives a few states away.

Love that when I have something that I think is interesting to say, I can find the right 140 characters (or less) to express my thoughts.

Hate when I don’t have time to keep up with those that I do follow.

I spend too much time checking Twitter updates.  I don’t have enough time to keep up with Twitter updates.  I installed the TwitterFox plug-in for Firefox and Twitterberry on my Blackberry because I feel like I need to keep up with what’s going on.  But I uninstalled Tweetdeck because there is way too much going on.  I’m usually pretty decisive about things, but not Twitter.  I love it, I hate it, I have a strong opinion that changes fairly often.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter what I think about Twitter. And it doesn’t matter what you think about Twitter. As a product manager I live every day by the saying that while my personal opinion might be interesting, it is completely and totally irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter what we think about Twitter.  What does matter is that your customers, prospects, supporters, and detractors are all using it.  They are saying good things, they are saying bad things.  People who want to learn about your company are using Twitter to learn more about your company’s products and services.  And from these 140 character snippits, they are going to your web site.  Think about that – they are going to search.twitter.com (formerly Summerize), typing in a keyword or phrase that you’ve worked really hard at getting to the top of Google search, and finding a ton of information about your company on a site full of 140 character microblogs.  And by the way, you don’t necessarily have a lot of control about what’s being said.

At WebTrends – not only is there Twitter talk, there is Twitter listening.  We spend a lot of time using all of the new, modern, social media tools out there so we are better marketers ourselves. While some of us think we’re doing some really cool, modern things regarding social media – it also freaks some of us out.  We know we have to do our best to measure our effectiveness and we know how hard it can be to measure that effectiveness. (just ask our own social media team how they are tracking the space)To make that measurement easier we employ a social media tagging strategy and the newly available Twitter tracking.

Click for Full Size Screenshot

We recently added tracking Twitter as a search engine in WebTrends Analytics reports.  It’s already in our On Demand offering, or if you use our software you can download an installer to upgrade your installation.  It’s probably not going to be at the top of your search engine reports, but you can use our reporting’s search feature to see what keywords and phrases people are using to find your site – what they are saying on Twitter.

Now -  if I could just sum up all these thoughts up in 140 characters …  If I only had the time.

The true custom reporting flexibility available in WebTrends Analytics allows our customers the ability to report upon a number of different initiatives via the unique combinations of dimensions, measures, and filters. By providing a robust set of options at not just the dimension and filter level, but the measure level as well, it is possible to truly customize what is tracked and reported to your user base. My intention over my first few blog posts will be to provide a number of simple techniques that can be utilized and combined for such initiatives at your firm.

To use a real world example, I am going to focus upon tracking marketing efforts on social media/networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, and del.icio.us. As these and other similar sites have become a popular and cost effective way to market to both potential and existing customers, the ability to report upon the results of those efforts has become increasingly important.

In this post, I will cover the creation of a relatively simple report that uses a single dimension of Visit Duration. Prior to designing the report, we will construct a number of custom measures that will group our various Web 2.0 Campaigns into different buckets that we can then report on (in this case we will just look at Twitter and Facebook). These individual Campaigns could of course always be broken out to focus upon attribution, but the real goal of this basic example is to instead highlight some of the available flexibility when it comes to customized measures, the use of which can be quite beneficial when it comes to segmentation and high-level reporting for various user groups.

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