Odeon Cinemas Next To Embrace Social Commerce

It seems Odeon are Fanatical about Facebook.

This week the UK’s biggest cinema chain Odeon, announced that cinema-goers will now be able to book tickets to films via their Facebook page, without having to leave the social network. Odeon’s embracing of social commerce follows a line of other brands in the UK including ASOS, French Connection, O2 & HMV set to utilise their social media presence to allow customers to purchase from their stores, and with this announcement it is safe to assume that Apollo and Cineworld will be watching closely…

To me, this move seems smart. Why wouldn’t a retailer want to have as many outlets for revenue generation? Assuming that Odeon’s 28K ‘likes’ on Facebook come from fans of going out to watch new films, there’s a perfect target audience to market to whilst the user experience doesn’t require a customer to leave the Facebook domain. Great for minimizing the cost-per-acquisition (CPA). 

Not to forget that Odeon is no stranger to using Facebook as a marketing tool - as it was the first UK cinema chain to launch a ‘check-in deal’, offering customers free popcorn when they ‘checked in’ at the cinema using the Facebook location tool. Facebook deals provides great integration with the wall and social graph, as well as mobile technology. Brands need to be looking at purchasing via social media store-fronts in a similar way. If I can see that my friends are all going to a movie on Friday night, I’m certainly going to think about seeing that movie myself, even before I’ve heard what they think of it. 

The act of turning ‘transactions into conversations’ may seem scary or confusing for many retailers and brands right now, but it is today’s brave and adventurous that will provide the case-studies for others to follow tomorrow… and make a few quid doing it.

For another look at the social commerce landscape, check out an article on Wired here 

The Categories Of Facebook Posters [PIC]

5 Reasons Why Its YES to a Skype & Facebook Union

Rumours have it that European VOIP provider Skype are closing in on a joint venture with Facebook or Google, with the social networking heavy-weight likely to be the forerunner in these preliminary talks. The deal would certainly assist any IPO ambitions for Skype, but I see 5 reasons for why Facebook should be the preferred partner within the walls of the Skype boardroom:

Growth potential

With a combined user base of 1.26 billion (Skype 663 million, Facebook 600 million) - we are talking about the biggest social company in the world - and puts it 2nd in the list of countries in the world behind China. That’s a hell of a lot of data - avatars, email addresses, names, locations etc. Acknowledging there is some cross-over between user-bases (though only 2.8 million likes on Facebook suggests otherwise), there would remain a huge opportunity to grow subscriptions through integrating both services across all user touch-points, recruitment tactics and product marketing.

Global reach

Historically, Skype has enjoyed a strong footing in Europe (its headquarters in Luxembourg and development team in Tallinn, Estonia and has Swedish founders) and growth markets such as Taiwan, China and Japan. The company in the past has attempted partnerships to build their user-base in the US - I remember a certain Myspace IM partnership - and Skype’s presence in the far-east and Europe would help Facebook combat competition from the likes of Orkut and Renren.

Sales potential

Ever since ebay parted with some of their stock of Skype in 2010, there has been talk of an IPO. Similarly, investors in Facebook may be eyeing up their own IPO next year. Having a successful partnership in place you’d think raise valuations for investors for both entities.

Skype also says that 35% of users utilize their services for business purposes, which may help provide an engaged user-base for any ambitions Facebook have for building on their proposition for commercial use. 

Complimentary services

Facebook are currently best-in-class for networking tools and a platform for connecting and sharing things with people you know. Excuse the rhetoric but they have significantly changed the way we communicate and are updated with our own and friends activity. Real-time chat however remains very much a bolt-on tool and not embedded within the social graph functionality. And any voice functions are left to third parties via applications (Audioboo, Google Voice, Jangl etc). You could see how Skype as a service - providing video calling, calls to mobile phones and group calls - could sit nicely with the suite of tools offered by Facebook, and increase dwell time on the site. Facebook would seem incredibly real-time with this service, when in comparison with the likes of Twitter. 

Imagine also that there could be a unified currency system to allow you to purchase Skype minutes using Facebook Credits. 

Integration

Partnerships are tricky. Different objectives, agendas, personalities and communication threaten to de-rail a union of any size but Facebook have established a standard for integration - over 250,000 websites have integrated with the Facebook platform, every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications and more than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every month. That’s seriously impressive, and shows that company-wide Facebook promote openness and a frictionless environment for users. Something Skype will be expecting from a partnership with either Facebook or Google. 

Could the brains behind Facebook Connect and ‘Like’ help offer a similar proposition on the web for a voice product, unifying identity and leveraging the social graph? You would like to think so…

These are my thoughts, but what do you think? Would your Facebook usage be complimented or hindered by a Skype integration? Please add a comment and let me know…

5 hot stories in media this morning

5 news stories compiled using Storify

Google has a Hunch

graphs (by @cdixon and @hunch)

How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success

What the F**k is Social Media NOW?

Interesting presentation from the people at Espresso on the state of social media in 2010. Some pretty impressive numbers around the penetration of what we deem as ‘social’, with some great sound-bytes in there.

The line I particularly like is ‘Now Social Media is Media‘…

What the F**k is Social Media NOW?  

HOW TO Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics

 If you use Google Analytics, you’ve undoubtedly seen a report like this:

The problem is, there’s no breakdown of “social media” in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and “see” this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it’s mixed in with “referring sites” and “direct traffic” but luckily, there’s a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Custom Segment

Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis. GA makes this fairly painless:

From any of the “Traffic Sources” sections, just click the “Advanced Segments” in the upper-right hand corner and then the link to “Create a new advanced segment.”

Step 2: Add Social Sources

This is the most crucial part, and requires that you have a full list of the sites/words to include. Don’t just use the domain names or URLs of the most popular social sites, but instead, use clever “catch-all” words using the “source” condition, as shown below:

Make sure to continue adding “OR” statements, not “and” statements - the latter will require that both conditions are met vs. any one of the “ORs”. Here’s a few examples, but you can add as many as what’s relevant:

• twitter
• tweetdeck
• facebook
• linkedin
• youtube
• reddit
• digg
• delicious
• stumbleupon
• ycombinator
• flickr
• myspace
• hootsuite
• popurls
• wikipedia
• bitly

Depending on your niche, it might be valuable to run through your top 2-500 referring domains looking for any obvious matches. You could also refer to Wikipedia’s list of popular social sites.

Step 3: Test & Name Your Segment

In order to create a fully functional segment, you’ll want to test the logic you’ve created to be sure results are returning. Before you do that, though, GA requires naming your segment (e.g. “social media”):

Once it’s complete and working properly, click “save segment.” You’ll be returned to the prior screen with the segment ready to rumble.

Step 4: Filter Traffic by “Social Media”

Your new segment is ready to be applied. You can now filter social media exclusively or see it in comparison to other traffic sources on any report in GA. Just use the advanced segments drop-down and choose “social media” under the custom segments list like so:

Segmenting social traffic is useful for reporting, particularly to gauge value (if you have action tracking on commercial activities set up in GA, for example) and see growth/impact over time. But, there’s more you can learn than just raw traffic and conversions numbers.

Here’s some examples of reports to look at, along with the value from the data:

Once broken out, you can compare referring social media sites more easily. If you then compare this against traffic “opportunity” from these sites (using a combination of traffic data and gut check), you’ll be able to find which sites have the greatest chance to improve. 

This next chart compares search vs. social traffic over time:

If looking to evaluate progress and make comparisons, this view is fairly useful. You can see that the effort in social is paying off and also having an effect on search engine traffic too (through new links, citations, etc). 

Next, the level of engagement of social media visitors:

Naturally you can compare engagement as a result of social referrals to search or direct traffic, but it is also handy to watch as you make tweaks to your site to encourage greater engagement and click-through to see if those efforts are successful.

Last, let’s look at the pages social visitors see:

These are all potential opportunities to create more customized landing experiences based on the referrer path, and the report can also give me insight about what content I need to continue producing if I want to draw in more social traffic. 

If social media marketing is a focus of your organization, segmenting that traffic in reporting is critical to determining the value of your efforts and improving. So get into GA, segment, and start seeing your traffic for what it really is. 

Original post via SEOmoz

Nike Write The Future Campaign Video

Nike Write The Future from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

An epic three-minute film ‘Write The Future’ which launched online via Facebook and YouTube on Friday 21 May 2010.  The film showcases how one footballing moment can be met with heroic achievement or defeat, sending a ripple effect across the globe. The film had 12,000,000 views in one day - and tripled Nike Football Facebook Fans from 1.1 to 3.1 million.

‘An immediate candidate for best soccer ad of the year, and maybe of all time.’ Adweek

Pretty impressive.