ImpactWatch Blog

Tomorrow is International Bacon Day. Not just crummy National Bacon Day, but literally “Let the World Celebrate Bacon Day.” In honor of this sacred event, I am resurrecting our “study” on Bacon in social media. Enjoy your holiday! (and Labor Day too)
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Hypothesis:

IF bacon is great THEN it will rule social media.

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Experiment:

Bacon in the Social Media News

1. Bacon explosion – a heart-warming (burning?) recipe involving 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage. Needless to say, this innovation warranted a write up in the New York Times and won the creators quite a traffic spike – over 16k inbound links and more than 1.5 million blog visitors.

2. Bacon Salt – A weapon in the “never-ending quest to make everything taste like bacon.” Bacon Salt has profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the founders were interviewed on Oprah.

3. Bacon AK-47 – The gents at ThisIsFreakingRidiculous.com made a full scale AK-47 assault rifle…out of bacon. It’s freaking ridiculous. Other bacon effigies include the Bacon Man, Bacon Suitcase and Bacon Bra (nice try, google it yourself).

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Bacon Blogs

There are nearly 3 million search results for Bacon in Google Blogs, 57k with Bacon in the title of the blog (both excluding results containing the word Kevin).

Some awesome blogs I discovered while “working” on this post:

- Bacon UnWrapped – A four-year-old site founded because 1) everyone loves bacon and 2) there aren’t nearly enough websites dedicated to the topic of bacon. Founder Heather Lauer has also created a bacon community and even wrote a book about bacon.

- Mr. BaconPants – Obviously the bacon blog with the best title, this repository of bacon news and reviews includes a weekly video podcast on bacon and bacon-related items.

- Bacon Today – Daily news about “sweet, sweet bacon.” The site’s uses its exclusive Smaste TM rating system for smell+taste-testing bacon-related products – a rating system that’s “as arbitrary as it is inaccurate.”

- The Bacon Show – A delicious new bacon recipe posted every day.

- Bacon Haikus – Lyrical links to bacon (news) bits.

- Royal Bacon Society – The Ultimate Resource for all things bacon – including a bacon store and bacon downloads.

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Bacon on Social Media Sites

Twitter -

TweetVolume says there have been 1.69 million tweets containing the word bacon in the history of Twitter.

BaconTwits tracks the word bacon on Twitter while @BaconFeed aggregates the #bacon hashtag (2,950 updates so far).

Apparently 48,367 people have added themselves to the WeFollow directory under the tag “bacon” . Truly mind-boggling.

Facebook – The top 5 bacon fan pages have a fanbase of more than 650k. There are over 3,000 members in just the top 20 bacon groups.

MySpace – Bacon doesn’t have as impressive of a presence on MySpace. Or maybe it does. I was distracted by all the glitter.

Flickr – 146,763 photos have titles or descriptions that mention Bacon -Kevin, 49,511 photos are tagged with Bacon -Kevin.

YouTube – 28,600 videos refer to Bacon -Kevin.

Delicious/Digg – Bacon is gaining steam on Digg, where story volume has been steadily climbing since 2006. There are 3,662 bacon stories on Digg – 34 of which have received over 1k diggs. 16,904 bookmarks on Delicious are tagged for bacon.

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Other Bacon bits:

- Pocket Bacon – Pretend to cook bacon whenever the mood strikes with this handy iPhone app.

- The Baconcyclopedia – The Ultimate Bacon Reference of Baconic Proportions

- Bacolicio.us – Add bacon to any website. Seriously. Do it.

Don’t think for a minute that Bacon has come to rule social media without a fight. Some PR challenges for Bacon:

- Swine Flu – The much-ignored CDC says that pork is safe, but that didn’t stop bunches* of concerned netizens from broadcasting their fear of bacon and its breathren

- Trichinosis – Bacon won’t give you #hamthrax, but being infested with worms is also pretty gross.

- Heart Disease – Bacon is fatty.

- PETA – Bacon is made of previously living animals.

- The pro-veg lobby – Bacon is meat.

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Conclusion:

While this study is not *perfectly* scientific, I’m pretty sure that excluding all Kevins cancelled out any illegitimate Bacon mentions. And, as you can see, Bacon is kicking Sausage’s ass on Twitter. So, I’m declaring victory for bacon in social media.

*A bunch is an official social media measurement term indicating “a lot”.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Bacon vs Sausage chart via Twist.
Bacon slice photo by SuperFantastic

• Social Media ROI? Traditional Is Still More Accepted – Social Media Explorer

• Why Social Media ROI Is The Most Over Debated & Misunderstood Topic? – Social Media Marketing in India

• 5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 – Read Write Web

• Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts – The New York Times

• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet – ken Burbary

• Why Sentiment Analysis is About as Reliable as a Canary in a Coal Mine – Marketing Pilgrim

• Web 2.0 Rule #7: Social media programs are a choice, social media monitoring is NOT – CK’s Blog

• The Single PR Metric and Flying Pigs – Measurement Standard

• You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Tac Anderson

• Why Measure ROI of Social Media? – Regular Geek

• Are we too worried with finding the ROI of social media? – Mack Collier

• How To Measure Your Social Media ROI: Don’t – Social Media Today

Tools Lists

• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – Dan LaRusso

Presentations

• Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi – The Brand Builder

Photo courtesy of Lara604 on flickr / CC BY 2.0

Over 1,450 marketers representing brands, agencies, consultants and non-profits participated in the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Study. The survey was developed by crowdsourcing input directly from the online marketing community.

Is your company currently using or planning to use social media? If planning, how long before implementation?

- 59% of marketers say social media is currently part of their activities.
- 28% are planning to implement social media in the future.
- 13% have no plans to engage in social media marketing.

What are the greatest barriers to social media use in your company?*

- 34% We don’t know enough about social media to begin
- 32% There’s no established way to measure the effectiveness of social media
- 25% There’s no funding in our budget for social media
- 25% Social media is not a proven/tested strategy
- 21% No time to invest in starting a social media program right now
- 20% I don’t feel there are any barriers
- 12% Legal constraints/company policy
- 9% Social media is not considered a good use of employee time

How are you measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts?
- 63% Tracking website hits
- 43% Tracking links on sites
- 42% Monitoring qualitative feedback/sentiment from those involved with the program
- 39% Tracking mentions on sites
- 39% Tracking sales/new business leads
- 30% Measuring buzz
- 27% Using a third party tracking service or research supplier
- 8% Other
- 13% Not measuring it

Types of Social Media Used

- 82% Facebook
- 73% Twitter
- 65% Blogs
- 62% Online videos
- 31% Podcasts
- 32% Webcasts
- 30% MySpace
- 28% User forums
- 28% Widgets
- 22% Wikis
- 23% Other

Other key findings include:

- Online, Search and Social Media as a group accounts for about a third of current marketing spend. This increases to over 40% for smaller companies.
- 60% of brand marketers forecast an increase in social media spending in 2010.
- Facebook, Twitter, online video and blogs are the 4 most popular social media tools. On average, marketers are using 5 to 7 other social media tools at the same time.

Download a copy of the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Study.

*Numbers are an average of the brand and agency numbers reported. For the exact breakdown, please see the full report.

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

• Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales – Left the Box

• Social Media Monitoring: Why You Must & Its Value – Techrigy

• Make Sure Social Media Metrics Are Meaningful – IT Business Edge

• The Truth About Measuring Social Media – Nation Ranch

• Scaling Social Media – Web Trends

• Can computers take the place of the personal touch in media evaluation - Corp Comms Magazine

• Social-Media ROI Elusive: MarketingProfs Poll – Marketing Profs

• Meeting the New Media Challenge with ROI – TalentZoo

• Why Your Small Business Needs to Measure Its Return on Social Media Investments – Content Marketing Today

• Best Practice Advice
  Social Media Monitoring – Listening is the new marketing! – eCircle

We’ve been saying this for a while. The customers are talking, are you listening?

• Wish List for Social Marketing Metrics – Half Rose Blog

Some good ideas for Social Media Metrics as they relate to marketing.

• Blogs and Social Media: Moving From Monitoring to Networking – yhteiskuntaetiikka.net

Great, you’re listening to the conversations about your brand or issue. What’s next? Join them.

• Social Media Metrics
• Social Media Metrics Tips from Experts
• Listening & Trust

Emerging Technologies Librarian knocked it out of the park this week with three great posts on Social Media Monitoring

• Answers to Social Media Questions You Should Know – Online Marketing Blog

Lee Odden answers questions on some Social Media basics including monitoring and third party data metrics.

Read last weeks top posts.

Photo courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt

For the second year in a row, non-profits have adopted social media at a faster rate than corporations or academic institutions.

A new research study, “Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities” compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007 and 2008 by the nation’s top 200 largest charities.

The study was conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm.

The study reveals that:

• 57% of charities have blogs, compared to colleges/universities at 41%, Inc 500 corporations at 39% and only 16% of Fortune 500 Co.s blogging.

• 90% of charities feel that their blog is successful.

• Use of at least one form of social media has increased from 75 to 89% of respondents.

• Usage increased for all social media tools studied: 79% of charities are using both social networking and video blogging, up 38 and 47% respectively over a year.

• 66% of charity respondents conduct online media monitoring, compared to 54% of academic institutions and 60% of the Inc 500.

• Over 80 percent feel that social media is at least “somewhat important” to their future strategy; 45 percent responded that social media is very important to their fundraising strategy.

“These organizations are demonstrating an acute, and still growing, awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives,” said Barnes. “They have found a new and exciting way to win the hearts – and maybe even the dollars – of potential donors. For volunteers and donors looking to have a conversation online about particular aspects of the charity’s mission, this increased interaction can be significant. These nonprofits are clearly learning to use social media more effectively.”

A full copy of the new research report can be downloaded from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

• Social Media, Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement – Beeline Labs

Beeline Labs recently conducted extensive research into how major corporations are monitoring, measuring and engaging via social media.

• The Difference Between Value and ROI – Metrics Man

Remember that silly distinction you learned in elementary school?  A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.  ROI is a form of value, but not all value takes the form of ROI.

• Tips to choose an Online Reputation Monitoring vendor – PhilGo20

Before evaluating the solutions, one would need some parameters to do so. Here’s a short list half-mine, half-borrowed

• Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples – Read Write Web

That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it’s a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation.

• No patience for the ROI of Social Media discussion – Buzz Marketing for Technology

And at this point in social media or even in the development of the web – we have plenty of ways to track and measure lead generation coming from Social Media. So much so that I have lost all patience for this discussion.

• Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate – Research Live

Who’s best at sifting through online chatter to find the insights that businesses need? People or computers?

• New technology turns social media into market research – Canada.com

A plethora of free services already exist. Google, for example, can alert a brand manager whenever a brand name is mentioned online. Other services scan Twitter or blogs for keywords. Yet they don’t break down the conversations by demographics or “sentiment” – whether people like or dislike a brand.

• Creepy If You Do, Clueless If You Don’t – The Net-Savvy Executive

Somehow, they’ve developed an expectation of privacy in public communication channels. They’re mistaken. But it’s in your company’s interest to avoid creeping out the customers, anyway.

• Online Reputation Management As Seen From The Outside – Read Write Web

Here, panelist Chris Gatewood, an IP, entertainment, and new media attorney, discusses a few important aspects of social media reputation management as it relates to the wider audience of social media users, not just the “new media gurus” who live online.

• Are You Monitoring Your Online Reputation? – Small Business Update

What this lawsuit shows is the need to be proactive at every turn when it comes to hearing the conversations that are taking place as well as securing your brand early on. Otherwise, you might just find that someone’s been proactive for you.

• Xerox embarks on social media monitoring program – Search CRM

Xerox is now establishing an internal task force to determine how it wants to monitor social media moving forward and whether it needs a single listening platform. It’s a broad group that includes corporate communication, corporate advertising, the vice president of the Xerox.com Web team, and a representative from each of the individual business groups.

• Five Easy Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success – Social Media Club

Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch a campaign. How do you define whether your campaign will be a success or not?

Slides and Conferences

AMEC Measurement Summit – The essence – PR Measurement in Germany

Assessing the assessors at AMEC’s Summit on Measurement – Katie Paine

Review of day one of AMEC and the IPR’s European Summit on PR Evaluation – Metrica

Driving ROI On Twitter – Hubspot

Unlocking Social Media’s ROI Through Monitoring and Participation – AMA Webinar
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See Last Week’s Top Posts
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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo couresy of Willrad.

AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, has released a new study to mark the opening yesterday of the 1st European Summit on Measurement in Berlin.

The results reveal that PR clients are increasingly interested in using media evaluation techniques to gauge the effectiveness of their PR programs. 77% of AMEC members reported an upward trend in client requests for measured proof of PR campaign success.

Other key results include:

• Increasing client interest in measuring social media (92%)
• Clients becoming more price sensitive (92%);
• Increase in the involvement of  procurement specialists in the purchase of measurement and evaluation services (69%)

Other study highlights are:

• Increase in client demand for measurement of online communications from 29% in 2008 to 41% in 2009.
• Increase in client demand for broadcast media evaluation from 15% of assignments in 2008 to 25% in 2009.
• 77% of clients commission single country programmes or projects.
• 54% of AMEC members are pessimistic toward economic conditions, believing the market will worsen in the next 12 months.

Barry Leggetter, Executive Director of AMEC, said: “It’s ironic but it has probably taken a recession to be the turning point for achieving a breakthrough in the recognition of the value that proper measurement can bring to a PR programme.”

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

A Geek Chart is a web badge that displays your activity on social media sites as an interactive pie chart.

The process is extremely simple, just enter your username for each of the sites you use – Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, your blog (with RSS available), Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Last.fm.

After a little processing, a pie graph is generated which represents your activity in the last 30 days. Each slice links to your profile on the corresponding site and displays the percentage of your activity on mouseover.

Hcdelp’s Geek Chart

Mine is a pretty boring pie because I waste away my days on Twitter and our blog. The “Explore” section of the Geek Chart site shows a sampling of charts made by other users. As you can see, everyone has a different mix of site usage, but Twitter dominates most people’s social media time.

Geek Chart automatically saves your profile information, so you can log on anytime to see your updated chart.

You’ll also want to avoid the site at the bottom of the hour when Twitter’s API limit turns 3rd party platforms into pumpkins.

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Make your own Geek Chart.

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Follow me on Twitter – I’m on there 67% of the time.

Hypothesis:

IF bacon is great THEN it will rule social media.

-

Experiment:

Bacon in the Social Media News

1. Bacon explosion – a heart-warming (burning?) recipe involving 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage. Needless to say, this innovation warranted a write up in the New York Times and won the creators quite a traffic spike – over 16k inbound links and more than 1.5 million blog visitors.

2. Bacon Salt – A weapon in the “never-ending quest to make everything taste like bacon.” Bacon Salt has profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the founders were interviewed on Oprah.

3. Bacon AK-47 – The gents at ThisIsFreakingRidiculous.com made a full scale AK-47 assault rifle…out of bacon. It’s freaking ridiculous. Other bacon effigies include the Bacon Man, Bacon Suitcase and Bacon Bra (nice try, google it yourself).

-

Bacon Blogs

There are nearly 3 million search results for Bacon in Google Blogs, 57k with Bacon in the title of the blog (both excluding results containing the word Kevin).

Some awesome blogs I discovered while “working” on this post:

- Bacon UnWrapped – A four-year-old site founded because 1) everyone loves bacon and 2) there aren’t nearly enough websites dedicated to the topic of bacon. Founder Heather Lauer has also created a bacon community and is releasing a book about bacon in a few days.

- Mr. BaconPants – Obviously the bacon blog with the best title, this repository of bacon news and reviews includes a weekly video podcast on bacon and bacon-related items.

- Bacon Today – Daily news about “sweet, sweet bacon.” The site’s uses its exclusive Smaste TM rating system for smell+taste-testing bacon-related products – a rating system that’s “as arbitrary as it is inaccurate.”

- The Bacon Show – A delicious new bacon recipe posted every day.

- Bacon Haikus – Lyrical links to bacon (news) bits.

- Royal Bacon Society – The Ultimate Resource for all things bacon – including a bacon store and bacon downloads.

-

Bacon on Social Media Sites

Twitter -

TweetVolume says there have been 1.69 million tweets containing the word bacon in the history of Twitter.

BaconTwits tracks the word bacon on Twitter while @BaconFeed aggregates the #bacon hashtag (2,950 updates so far).

Apparently 48,367 people have added themselves to the WeFollow directory under the tag “bacon” . Truly mind-boggling.

Facebook – The top 5 bacon fan pages have a fanbase of more than 650k. There are over 3,000 members in just the top 20 bacon groups.

MySpace – Bacon doesn’t have as impressive of a presence on MySpace. Or maybe it does. I was distracted by all the glitter.

Flickr – 146,763 photos have titles or descriptions that mention Bacon -Kevin, 49,511 photos are tagged with Bacon -Kevin.

YouTube – 28,600 videos refer to Bacon -Kevin.

Delicious/Digg – Bacon is gaining steam on Digg, where story volume has been steadily climbing since 2006. There are 3,662 bacon stories on Digg – 34 of which have received over 1k diggs. 16,904 bookmarks on Delicious are tagged for bacon.

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Other Bacon bits:

- Pocket Bacon – Pretend to cook bacon whenever the mood strikes with this handy iPhone app.

- The Baconcyclopedia – The Ultimate Bacon Reference of Baconic Proportions

- Bacolicio.us – Add bacon to any website. Seriously. Do it.

Don’t think for a minute that Bacon has come to rule social media without a fight. Some PR challenges for Bacon:

- Swine Flu – The much-ignored CDC says that pork is safe, but that didn’t stop bunches* of concerned netizens from broadcasting their fear of bacon and its breathren

- Trichinosis – Bacon won’t give you #hamthrax, but being infested with worms is also pretty gross.

- Heart Disease – Bacon is fatty.

- PETA – Bacon is made of previously living animals.

- The pro-veg lobby – Bacon is meat.

-

Conclusion:

While this study is not *perfectly* scientific, I’m pretty sure that excluding all Kevins cancelled out any illegitimate Bacon mentions. And, as you can see, Bacon is kicking Sausage’s ass on Twitter. So, I’m declaring victory for bacon in social media.

*A bunch is an official social media measurement term indicating “a lot”.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Bacon vs Sausage chart via Twist.
Bacon slice photo by SuperFantastic