The LinkedIn company pages are largely under-utilised in my opinion.  Every brand has a Facebook page for instance that they use to talk to their fans or followers, but a much lower number take advantage of the company pages on LinkedIn.  To some extent that has been justifiable as the range of tools available on LinkedIn have paled in comparison.

LinkedIn are slowly pulling their finger out though and this week released a couple of new tools for Company Page marketers.  The first was a new service called Targeted Updates.  This will allow marketers to send a specific message to specific followers.  You'll have the ability to target followers based on specific criteria, including industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees and geography.  New product announcements to buyers, software updates to users, job announcements to college grads who don’t already work for your company, etc.

The second new service is Follower Statistics.  This is a basic analytics service that will give you insight into who is interacting with your content.  Not only will companies be able to view their follower count, but they can now also track engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, percentage engagement as well as follower demographic information.

As experienced Facebook Page owners will know, none of this is really out of the ordinary, but it's a nice addition to bring LinkedIn up to speed.  As seems common on LinkedIn, the features aren't available to all yet but they're going to be rolled out fully over the coming weeks.

Social media loves big numbers.  The excellent social media revolution video makes a great play of showing off just how quickly social media has grown and how many people use it each day.  The individual social networks like to join in this game as well.  Large user bases are attractive to both users and advertisers alike.

But how relevant are these numbers?  The number of active users at Google+ has been under particular scrutiny after the Wall Street Journal labelled the network a ghost town after comScore data suggested users spend on average a few minutes on the site each month.

So news released yesterday that they have grown staggeringly well in the past month or so comes as something of a shock.  What comes as even more of a shock is that according to Google I'm an active user of the social network.  It should be said that I stated my dislike for the network pretty early on, and whilst I have a profile there it would be stretching it to call it an active one.  But y'see, that in itself doesn't matter, because that's not how Google are defining an active user of Google+.  I use YouTube alot whilst logged into G+.  That makes me active.  I use GMail whilst logged in.  I use the Google search engine whilst logged in.  All of these things apparently make me an active user of the Google+ social network, even though I haven't actually logged on to plus.google.com for some time.

Now of course everyone knows deep down that boasting about having a huge Twitter following or lots of Facebook fans is a waste of time, because the percentage of those people that actively engage with you regularly is much less than the headline figure.  That's fair enough, but what Google are doing is worse than that because they are being a bit sneaky with what actually is a user.  It begs the question if they have nothing to hide why they're being quite so slippery with their user figures.

I've written before that as marketers we should only be interested in the people that engage with us regularly.  They're the key people, they're the ones that are going to make or break you.  So don't fall into Google's trap of chasing big headline numbers because they matter as little for you as they do for Google.

ROI, ROI, ROI.  I like to think that the blog isn't purely about ROI, but it's kinda important so there have been a few articles about it recently.    New research by Washington University argues that most online marketers fail to take account of the impact of their online work on offline behaviours, a thing they call cross-channel sales spillover.  They also believe that the traditional last click wins method of attributing revenue stinks because it inevitably fails to account for lifetime revenue from that customer.

The researchers developed an empirical method of calculating the lifetime value of customers acquired via search advertising.  The research suggests that the average value per click from SEM is around $10, so a healthy profit on the average cost per click of around $0.80.

Suffice to say that search advertising is already attractive to marketers because it provides such a natural fit between what the customer needs and what the company supplies.  The act of searching provides advertisers with a ready supply of people in the right mindset to buy, something that cannot be said for social media advertising, despite the ability to target by demographic.  If you can quantify the lifetime value of each new search engine customer though the value grows significantly.

By merging web traffic and sales data from a small-sized U.S. firm, the researchers created an individual customer-level panel that tracks all repeated purchases, both online and off-line, and tracks whether or not these purchases were referred from Google search advertising.

The results revealed that customers acquired from Google spent more often than those acquired from other channels.  When you take into account the cross channel spillover as online customers shop offline as well then the value increases still further.

“The conventional method normally just looks at online transactions, that are one-time transactions,” says co-author Ying Xie, associate professor of marketing. “But in our method we propose that we should think about the customer’s lifetime value.

“In their lifetime, they could be an active customer, repeatedly making purchases. The cumulative amount of these purchases—that’s the profit stream we should take into account.”

To derive the lifetime value of each customer the researchers aggregated three data sources to help construct a customer data panel that allowed them to track online browsing history, repeat purchases and data from both online and offline channels.

They then developed an integrated model of customer lifetime, transaction rate and gross margin. Based on their model’s estimates, they find that the firm would incur a loss of $48 on average to acquire a new customer if using the conventional method.

After accounting for sales spillovers across channels and the long-term effect, the estimated value of customer acquisition is as high as $950 per customer.

The video below sees the researchers talking about their findings.

If you want to start tracking the lifetime value of your customers the ever excellent Avinash Kaushik has some great tips on how you can begin to measure lifetime customer value.

Determining the ROI of your social media efforts remains a constant struggle, despite the launch last month of some new social media reports on Google Analytics that make it easier to assign financial value to social media effort.

Data company Backupify has attempted to take a data management approach to things and has put together an infographic revealing the value of a tweet vs a Yelp review (amongst other things).

“We want to get people to think about the value of the content they are creating,” Backupify CEO and co-founder Rob May said, “and how much it is worth to them.”

“If you’re a social network, you want to think about the types of content your users can create,” Mr. May said. “Photos are pretty valuable compared to other types of content. While text is much less valuable.”

According to the study the average Facebook user is worth $118.34 due to the vast range of ways each user can add content to the site.  LinkedIn comes next, which is not surprising given the richness of the content produced by the professionals on the site.

Interestingly, whilst each Twitter user is quite valuable, each individual tweet is practically worthless, being valued at 0.001 cents each.

“One tweet doesn’t create a lot of value for the other people on Twitter because the things in my Twitter stream are not things that I’m acting on in general,” Mr. May said. “Most tweets are pay-me-to-read-them, right? They’re not that interesting.”

So perhaps not surprisingly, the value from each piece of content comes from the amount of time and effort that went into creating it.  Multiply this by the amount of content created and you get the value of each member to a social network.  Anyway, here's the infographic for you.

Here in London I try and cycle to work as much as possible.  It's generally quicker than public transport plus of course the saving of around £25 a week is not to be sniffed at.  It's noticeable that there are more and more cyclists joining me on the commute to work, especially now the weather is improving.  New research suggests that this is not confined to the UK, especially amongst the young.

The research shows that youngsters in the U.S., Canada, Germany, South Korea, and other countries are driving less, and cycling or using public transport in significantly higher numbers.

Here are some key stats from the report:

• Driving is down: The number of vehicle miles traveled by 16 to 34-year-olds in the U.S. dropped 23% between 2001 and 2009. As well, the share of 14 to 34-year-olds without driver’s licenses grew between 2001 and 2010 from 21% to 26%.
• Biking is up: In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds in the U.S. took 24% more bike trips than in 2001 – even with that age group shrinking in size by 2%.
• Public Transport is up: Public transport use by that same group also rose in the same period — passenger miles traveled are up by a huge 40%.

Interesting isn't it?  In a wide spread of developed countries, from the UK to South Korea, the number of young people either without driving licenses or with them but not driving so much was rising fast.

The report offers the following suggestions as to why this is so:

• It’s easier to use a phone when you’re not driving. “Public transportation is more compatible with a lifestyle based on mobility and peer-to-peer connectivity than driving,” notes the study.
• Environmental commitment. In a KRC Zipcar survey, 16% of 18 to 34-year-olds said they strongly agreed with the statement, “I want to protect the environment, so I drive less.” Only about 9% of older generations said the same thing.
• Bike-sharing programs are more available. Technology “makes bike-sharing programs possible and convenient,” says the study. In just the past two years, at least nine U.S. cities have launched bike-sharing services, including Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C, whilst of course Boris Bikes are very popular in London.
• Car-sharing programs are also on the rise. Says the report: “Technology has also led to the creation of transportation options that did not exist 15 or 20 years ago. With car-sharing services such as Zipcar, for example, the Internet and smart phone applications allow users to reserve, pay for and locate cars easily, at any time of the day.”

They are at pains to state that this isn't merely a trend amongst the unemployed, who you would expect not to travel as much.  They noted the same trend amongst the employed young as well.

With many more young people choosing to not have or use a car, how long before transport policy catches up?

How to reach B2B customers has been a constant challengers for marketers, and this has certainly been the case in the digital world.  Especially in social media there is never a shortage of sites vying for your attention, with barely a week going by without a new network arriving on the scene to demand a presence.

New research by the Aberdeen Group suggests that many marketers are still not seeing strong responses from social media activity, although the best do appear to significantly outperform the rest.

So how can you join the best of breed?

I've been doing social media almost exlusively in the B2B space for the last few years and there are some clear lessons that can be learnt from that time. 

I would break down the task of the B2B marketer as providing content and providing community. 

1. Content rules

The Process Excellence Network have done some research into what B2B professionals want from the site recently.  The top two items are white papers and webinars.  So they want substantial content either in textual format or via a more visual format. 

Marketers have found both of these approaches very effective at reaching B2B professionals because they:

1. provide an answer to a problem the customer is having
2. provide that answer in a format that suits them
3. gets straight to the point and does not waste their time
4. provide an excellent pre-sell and start the relationship with the customer, making follow-up much easier

2. Community is king

Something else to consider is community.  I wrote an article for Social Business News this week after new research revealed the massive financial benefits of having a strong community around your company or topic area.  The research revealed that if your customers have excellent relationships with each other, then the impact on your bottom line is exceptional.

This is something that many marketers fail with because they cannot resist the urge to sell at all times.  If you can focus instead on developing the relationships between your customers though the evidence suggests that you will reap some excellent results.

Now none of this is really all that remarkable.  Provide content that solves a clear customer problem is not something any marketer should need reminding, whilst things like Metcalfe's Law should tell anyone the power and importance of a well connected network of customers, yet research by Price Waterhouse Cooper last year showed just how many B2B marketers are failing.

Great content.  Great community.  Nail those two things and the leads will flood in.

As regular readers of the blog will know, I'm quite sceptical about claims made by agencies that they can send your content or product viral with any degree of certainty.  Research has revealed that our social network tends to consist primarily of people that are very much like us, and as such it is difficult for new ideas to spread when everyone we know already knows much of what we know.

A new piece of research the University of Indiana attempts to shed a bit more light on how things spread between social networks.  I'm afraid the findings are bad news for agencies who would have you believe something spreading is all down to them however.  The findings from the research suggest that viral success is more down to the structure of the social network and the attention span of the people within it than it ever is to do with either the content or the author.  So in other words it's pretty random.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers build a computer model of a system similar to Twitter.  Each software agent within the system had a limited attention span, again seeking to mimic Twitter.  So each 'user' would only remember a meme for a short period of time.  The researchers regularly input memes into the system and used some simple rules to pick virtual viral sensations.  Using this methodology they were quickly able to replicate how Twitter behaves based on their analysis of 120 million retweets from 12.5 million users.

"Our question was, can we look at these things to explain why some become very popular–why some YouTube videos go viral and others don't. There might be one dancing cat that gets a million views, but another dancing cat where only two people watch," the researchers said.

Whereas the natural world tends to pick its winners and losers based on a survival of the fittest process, it has proven harder to determine how information lives or dies.  Instead they found that the spread of an idea or piece of content was not really reliant upon the strength of that idea.  Less survival of the fittest as survival of the luckiest.

This does not really mean that there are no ideas more interesting or people more influential than others, only that the role of those factors is easy to overestimate.

"Of course, there are things that are more objectively interesting than others and if you write about them, probably yes, that will receive a bunch of following. However, even if you don't you might get lucky. And even if you do, someone else might be posting the same thing and get the attention instead of you," they said.

So just as Napolean wanted generals who were lucky rather than great, maybe the same should apply to your tweets.

Apple have been in the news recently after their manufacturing supplier Foxconn was found to use somewhat questionable behaviours towards their employees.  A major reason for these employee abuses was that whenever Apple launched a new product such was the mass surge in demand that it put tremendous pressure on Foxconn, which would then be followed by relative fallow periods.  It has been said that China remains an attractive manufacturing location for large companies in part because companies there can mobilise large employee numbers at relatively short notice.

Of course this has raised ethical questions over whether this inevitably means that the supplier ends up pushing employees further than they should, either ethically or legally.  New research however suggests that from Apples perspective lumping product launches into bursts like this is good practice.

The study was performed by researchers from the University of California, Davis.  They studied 20 years of product launches where the products were part of a two-sided market, where one side is the consumer and the other is the market.  To use an iPhone as an example, the consumers can have the iPhone for doing their thing, whilst on the market side app developers make the games and widgets that help the device realise its potential.

The researchers suggest that both markets must be successful at the same time for either to succeed individually.  To achieve this they suggest companies must overcome certain obstacles, including:

• Chicken and egg problem—For instance if you want developers to build products for a platform but you don't have many customers, and vice versa you want customers to choose a product on a platform without many applications.

• Uncertainty in product design and compatibility—For example, should all electric cars use the same battery, one that could be charged at every battery station, or will the market be fragmented among many technologies?

• Convincing consumers to pay high up-front costs—In return for small and uncertain benefits delivered over time (such as residential solar power).

• Growth-versus-profitability dilemma—Should a vendor of an e-book technology sacrifice margin and profits in return for a high market share in order to entice publishers toward its technology?

The research team found that companies are better off doing large scale product launches rather than a small launch with the hope that developers will adopt it en masse, therefore allowing it to scale, which is what often happens.

While the common belief is that firms can either have growth or achieve profits in the early launch of a product, “our research is founded on the proposition that growth and profitability need not necessarily operate in conflict,” they say.

“Firms should expand the product line early in order to increase the installed base and induce a higher level of developer participation,” they add.

To do this they suggest building two versions of the same product.  A basic version makes it easy to build a reasonably mass market to then attract developers, whilst the premium product offers the higher profit margin to keep the money men happy.

Of course putting out two products at the same time puts quite a strain on your supply chain, as Apple and Foxconn have only too clearly shown us in recent weeks.

Traditionally the LinkedIn group search has been a rather basic affair, limited as it was to searching by group title and description.  That's great so long as those fields accurately portray every discussion that goes on in that group.  The likelyhood is of course that discussions will be much richer than any description can do justice to.

So it was nice to see LinkedIn announce an overhaul of their group search functionality on their blog this week.  The new functionality will allow you to get results based on the discussions within the groups as well as the meta information about the group.  In addition they show you which of your connections are also members of that group.

LinkedIn do appear to regard their groups as a key selling point given the addition of decent group analytics in recent times, so this is another step in the right direction.  Thus far the functionality is only available for a limited number of keywords, but you can try it out by searching for groups about social media, interview tips, or real estate.

Earlier this year it was revealed that Facebook was the most popular social network for event marketers.  The research, conducted by Constant Contact, revealed that 90% of event marketers prefer Facebook.  At the time it kinda surprised me, but I suppose working in the B2B world for the last few years that is to be expected.

You can imagine my surprise therefore when Eventbrite released some figures today revealing the true value of a share on various social networks and lo and behold, Facebook again triumphed.  Apparently each time an event is shared on Facebook it's worth £2.25 to the organiser, compared to £1.80 on Twitter and £1.24 on LinkedIn.

Eventbrite events have an easy to use social integration so it's simple for people to share with their network that they're attending a particular event.  The integration is so smooth that Facebook is now the leading source of traffic to Eventbrite.

"Social lets you reach a much more targeted group of people, so without knowing it at the start we stumbled across a business that could really use social media to grow.” Eventbrite's VP of marketing Tamara Mendelsohn said.

Having used Eventbrite a few times for events, the research raises a few questions.

Firstly they don't provide any breakdown of the stats by vertical, so it's not possible to see if Facebook wins for B2B as well as B2C or in particular industries.  After all, if we're trying to gauge which social networks are going to give us the best return on our time and money this information is key.

Secondly they don't reveal whether sharing on Facebook is more valuable because sharing on Facebook is that much easier.  The integration between Facebook and Eventbrite is really good.  LinkedIn for instance isn't so tightly integrated.  So is this simply a case that people find it easier to share on Facebook, therefore it can appear more valuable?  If you're not using Eventbrite for instance the results could be very different.

As is often the case with research as PR it often raises more questions than it answers.