Coca-Cola’s success in social media isn’t a secret. The company was recently named by Slate’s The Big Money as the brand “making the best use of Facebook,” and their well-publicized Expedition 206 campaign is billed as the company’s largest social media project ever. We’ve conducted several interviews in the past few months with key team members of Coca-Cola about the company’s efforts in community building and social media. Here’s a rundown:

Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola’s Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing spoke to us about the Expedition 206 project’s search for happiness, how Coke’s marketers have established best practices for social media marketing, and the challenge of ROI. Says Donnelly, in this excerpt published in our Daily Newsletter:

In general, we are very supportive of buying media within those realms. It’s like fishing where the fish are. Social media is where our consumers are at the moment. There’s no better way to amplify your message. If you’re building a major campaign and putting a lot of time and energy into enabling social and interactive aspects, you have to make sure people know about it.

Our strategy is to be everywhere our consumers are, but as a member of the community. That’s not to say that we think there’s anything wrong with big billboards in Times Square or Super Bowl commercials. There’s a time and a place for that. Within the social media marketing realm, our approach is to be a strong member of the community that’s enabling consumers to celebrate manifestations of the brand.

Michael La Kier chatted about how the company ties social media into its My Coke Rewards program and its drive to create emotional loyalty. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say about social media and mobile:

We offered mobile from day one—it is a big component of My Coke Rewards. People drink our brands on the go and don’t want to carry a bottle cap all day long. They can enter a code via mobile phone and SMS texting. Mobile has always been a pretty big part of our program from a participation standpoint and from a mobile messaging and marketing perspective. We also have a desktop widget so people can enter codes directly from their desktop computer.

We have a variety of ways for people to participate in the program—via SMS, the site and the widget. When they become members, we can look at what brands they’re drinking, which packs they’re buying, promotions they’ve participated in and rewards they’ve redeemed. We look at how people want to interact with us, what information do we want to know, how do we provide value and get value. We invite them to take surveys. We have a lot of information about what consumers are doing and their passions so that we can serve up rewards, offers and sweepstakes based on that information.

Carol Kruse, Coke’s Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing, also weighed in about earned media ROI and the evolution of social:

I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

In that context, we are asking whether it’s driving brand health or brand love. Is it driving purchase intent? In some cases, like search and online advertising, we have been able to measure ROI driving true incremental volumes and true increases in sales. It’s the same thing from a loyalty and CRM standpoint. We have a lot of online promotions and online loyalty programs like My Coke Rewards, and we’ve certainly measured the amount of true incremental volume those type of programs drive.

Adam Brown, Director, Office of Digital Communications & Social Media at Coke, spoke about the company’s Expedition 206 campaign:

We wanted to bring the idea of happiness to life and have as many people participate as possible. We haven’t done anything like this before, so it’s a new social media experiment. The three people chosen will blog, share photos, videos, interviews, tweets (@x206) and ideas about what makes people happy around the world. They’ll share their experiences. It’s the latest expression of the “Open Happiness” campaign brought to life through the power of social media.

We will be looking at what earned media provides from a ROI standpoint. We want to know what’s working and creating buzz and what’s not. We are using a cloud-based philosophy and we want to leverage all the new communications platforms as they come online. We can really adapt and empower our fans to create compelling content where they see fit.

Each of these interviews is available in their full form to eMarketer Total Access subscribers. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs. Those full-version interviews are available (to subscribers) here:

• Carol Kruse: Coke Weighs Value of Social Media
• Michael Donnelly: Coke Crafts Social Media Marketing Blueprint
• Michael La Kier: Coke Seeks Brand Love via Online Loyalty
• Adam Brown: Coke Goes on a Happiness Mission

The fabled “year of mobile” may never have fully materialized, but in many ways, the past 10 years have been a decade of mobile. As the ‘00s draw to a close, it’s worth putting the advances mobile has made in context.

A simple measure of that progress (although by no means the only one) is the number of mobile subscriptions per 100 people. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), that figure stood at 12.1% globally in 2000; by the end of 2009, it had risen to an estimated 67%, representing around 4.6 billion total mobile subscriptions.

Granted, people can and do have more than one subscription, making for some double-counting inevitable, but the overall trend itself is unmistakable: nearly six-fold growth in the space of 10 years, far outpacing that of any other personal communication technology. In that span of time, mobile devices have evolved rapidly from a luxury good to a basic necessity – a portable communication and information lifeline.

Today, we view that evolution – the addition of more features and capabilities coupled with a steady reduction in the price of both mobile devices and services – as a given. But at the start of the decade, much of what we now take for granted seemed almost fanciful.

Browsing through the eMarketer report archives, I came upon the following snippet from the March 2000 “eGlobal Report”:

Currently, data offered over mobile phones is limited and slow; the phones download data at only 9,600 bits per second, a fifth of the speed of a standard modem. However, this is all about to change. In the coming year, applications and portals built around the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard will begin to expand the market by bringing millions of new Internet users online, creating new markets for messaging, advertising, and e-commerce, and changing the geography and demographics of Web users.

By 2002, the introduction of high-speed mobile networks will allow
small cell phones to display full color, high-resolution video, albeit on a relatively tiny screen. Third-generation devices will truly make wireless phones useful Internet viewers. These technologies will allow downloading at 2 million bits per second, 40 times faster than today’s 56K modems. They will still rely on specially formatted content and will lack the clarity and screen size of a PC. However, the most advanced devices will open the way to a wide range of functions people use the Internet for – everything from entertainment to video conferencing to personalized advertising beamed to you on the commute home from the office.

We were right about the general trend, but like many analysts, wrong about the timeline. It took devices and networks a little longer to develop those capabilities and make them available at an affordable price. And likewise, businesses and consumers lagged in taking full advantage of the medium. But eventually, we made a lot of the strides predicted in 2000. To again put that evolution in context, eMarketer predicts there will be 657 million mobile Internet users globally in 2010. That’s nearly equal to the number of total mobile subscribers in 2000.

Mobile enters the next decade with a lot of momentum behind it, but as I discussed here on the eMarketer blog and in my recent iMedia Connection column, there’s still plenty of work to be done, gaps to be bridged and problems to be solved. Mobile device, access, content and advertising markets remain in a state of flux.

The central challenge device manufacturers, marketers and publishers alike face today and the years ahead is making content available where, when and how their end users want to consume it. Thanks to the advent of ubiquitous wireless broadband networks and an expanding range of portable Internet access platforms, solutions, increasingly, must be anywhere and anytime.

We recently spoke with Lauren Freedman, President of the E-Tailing Group, about multichannel retailing. Here’s a snippet from the full version available to eMarketer Total Access subscribers, where she discusses how mobile technology will affect the shifting industry landscape:

eMarketer: Let’s shift gears here and talk about another multichannel retail service: Web access from in-store. Do you see retailers switching their focus from Web kiosks to mobile technology?

Ms. Freedman: I think it’s early in the game. There is definitely consumer interest in mobile. But we haven’t seen much use of it to be truthful. I’m seeing it more on the Websites while we’re doing our mystery shopping right now for product reviews and other things.

eMarketer: Do you think there’s some retail categories where kiosks don’t make sense? Should every retailer have kiosks?

Ms. Freedman: Again, I think it goes back to the merchant’s goals and what they want to accomplish and if the kiosk can accomplish that. It also seems like, in some instances, it’s about what’s being vendor-funded.

Kiosks have never been ubiquitous to begin with and I think we’re in the early days. As an example, we did this other study, which we haven’t published that had some questions about mobile and kiosks. We asked 1,000 consumers to rate what their ideal shopping experience would be and what the reality is.

One survey question was, “I want to use or I use my mobile phone in the store to access product reviews, secure additional product information, price compare and even locate merchandise at another store.” On a scale of 1 to 5 scale where 5 and 4 were somewhat important, only 18 percent of the people said that they were ideal and 8% actually use them.

We then asked, “Is it ideal to have access to the Web or access the Web in the store for product information gathering beyond a sales associate?” For this question, 45% of the people said that that would be ideal, and 13% actually used it.

Then we asked about kiosks. “Informational kiosks should be able to help me or help me with decision-making while I’m in the store.” Some 48% of the people said it was ideal, 10% of the people actually used it.

The mobile question is interesting. Freedman is right: It may still be too early to track how retailers have capitalized on in-store Web use, except perhaps, in Japan. Still, as we’ve wrote before, the opportunity for retailers to go digital at the point of sale will be exciting to watch.

Technology will certainly play its part, as will consumer adoption: Increasingly, mobile coupons are perceived as a effective opportunity for many brand marketers and retailers, and it appears consumers are starting to pick up on the trend. The buzz also continues to grow around QR codes — a matrix code which allows consumers to snap mobile photos and instantly receive product information. Between burgeoning technologies and growing consumer demand for digital integration in stores, 2010 figures to be a fascinating year for the convergence of Web and in-store retail marketing tactics.

Coca-Cola’s Adam Brown has quite a 2010 planned. The company will launch its Expedition 206 campaign, the massive global social media experiment poised to send three “happiness ambassadors” in search of happiness in the 206 countries in which Coke does business. We were lucky enough to chat with him recently. Here’s a clip from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access:

eMarketer: What is the goal of Expedition 206?

Mr. Brown: We want to bring the idea of happiness to life and have as many people as possible participate. The three people will blog, share photos, videos, interviews, tweets and ideas about what makes people happy around the world. It’s the latest expression of the “Open Happiness” campaign brought to life through the power of social media.

eMarketer: It sounds like a publicity stunt.

Mr. Brown: We want to make this as genuine as possible. The three people will travel by themselves. There’s no production team. We’re crowdsourcing—our fans will tell us where we should go to find happiness. Fans of Coke are already involved on multiple social media platforms—Facebook, orkut, Bebo, YouTube, Google—and we’ll populate the content through all of these properties. We’ll have an online dashboard on the Expedition 206 Website through which fans can interact with our team.

eMarketer: Which corporate department is spearheading this initiative?

Mr. Brown: The project is a joint effort between the marketing, public affairs and corporate communications teams.

eMarketer: Will Coke be using any paid media to promote Expedition 206 or tying into existing ad campaigns?

Mr. Brown: It’s primarily an earned media program. We’ll spread the word through all the social media platforms. It’s mostly viral. But we have to do some paid media and tie-ins to existing media programs. It’s a tapestry—we can weave earned and paid media together.

eMarketer: Do you expect to develop original content for TV and the Web from Expedition 206?

Mr. Brown: We’re exploring all opportunities with cable nets for original content and series.

eMarketer: How will Coke prove the return on investment (ROI) on Expedition 206?

Mr. Brown:We will be looking at what earned media provides from an ROI standpoint. We want to know what’s working and creating buzz, and what isn’t. We are using a cloud-based philosophy and we want to leverage all the new communications platforms as they come online. We can really adapt and empower our fans to create compelling content where they see fit.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Can Facebook continue its momentum into 2010? Last week I wrote about TBI Research’s forecast that Facebook would generate $1 billion in revenue in 2010, a substantial increase from the $550 million TBI estimated Facebook would earn this year.

Today, eMarketer released my latest forecast for social network ad spending. I estimate that marketers will spend $435 million worldwide on Facebook in 2009 and $605 million next year, a 39% increase. My figures include only paid advertising (such as Facebook’s Engagement Ads, search and self-serve ads) and don’t include any other form of revenue, such as the money Facebook makes when a member purchases a virtual gift item.

Overall, I expect marketers to spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide, up 12% over 2009. In the US, spending is expected to grow 7.1% next year, to $1.3 billion.

The momentum behind Facebook has been one of the key social media marketing trends of 2009. But I believe several macro trends will play out in 2010. For Facebook to maintain its dominance (and potentially increase it) it will need to create ad formats that capitalize on these trends:

Earned media takes center stage. Marketers will look for better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media—the additional free exposure that a brand gets when consumers talk about a brand online or share information about their interactions with it.

Social networks will challenge traditional local ad venues. By some accounts, Facebook’s self-serve ad system, which caters to small and local businesses, is generating a sizable chunk of the company’s revenues. With geolocation technology, local ad targeting and location-based services on mobile phones, there will be many more opportunities for local businesses to make their marketing more social.

Social combined with search will yield better results and more ad opportunities. Search will meet social by incorporating real-time content (e.g., tweets from Twitter and status updates from MySpace and Facebook) into search results, adding information from social network friends to search results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevancy. These trends will yield new ad formats—and will raise new red flags for privacy advocates.

Social ad networks will expand. Expect more momentum behind advertising that is targeted based on information from social network user profiles.

Will Facebook succeed? Let me know in the comments.

To purchase the report, click here. Total Access subscribers, log in and view the report now.

Most businesses have realized that when it comes to social networks like Twitter or Facebook, simply broadcasting content isn’t quite enough. Consumers want companies to engage with them on social networks — not because they want to have a relationship, per say, with a brand of soap or shampoo, but because they appreciate the opportunity to give feedback on products, receive meaningful information from brands, and catch the occasional bargain, among other things.

According to research from Cone, some 74% of US new media users have a generally more positive impression of a company or brand after interacting via new media. That might be why so many marketers are planning to move from the trial phase of their social marketing efforts toward strategic use of the channel next year: Customer retention and engagement ranked below only new customer acquisition in a Unisfair study of leading marketing priorities among US marketers in 2010.

Still, engagement means many things. For some, it means creating a team of customer service representatives to scour social networks for complaints, questions and praise. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one successful example of this. JetBlue’s Twitter feed is another. But here’s a question that has been raised by some, and is worth considering: Are customer service efforts on Twitter a danger when customers start to expect a direct response and brands aren’t available or have the resources necessary to deliver? Will consumers view it as the same thing as not picking up the customer service phone line?

Noah Brier of The Barbarian Group, along with Hive Awards’ Alan Wolk, AdWeek Editor Brian Morrissey and Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer, chatted about the engagement expectation in this excellent video. Take a look: (Watch the whole thing, or skip to the 4:00 minute mark.)

The Social Media Bubble Part 2 of 3 from Hive Awards on Vimeo.

Money quote from Schafer:

You can’t set expectations where, if you have a problem with a Best Buy gift card, the Best Buy CEO is, all of a sudden, going to help you out. It’s just not rational. Things don’t happen at that kind of scale. At the end of the day, understanding social media as a brand doesn’t necessarily mean having a conversation with your customer. That’s a real big misnomer out there. [The alternative solution, therefore] may very well be enabling your customers to have conversations with each other.

Schafer also points out how instead of directly engaging customers on social networks, brands like Apple have created forums and communities where customers can interact with other customers or ‘brand-certified’ specialists. What do you think? Are you willing to allocate the resources to manage the engagement expectation, or are there alternative solutions? What type of social media engagement is right for your brand?

Yesterday, TBI Research released a research note projecting that Facebook will top $1 billion in revenue in 2010. This follows an earlier estimate of $710 million from NYPPEX, a private equity advisory firm.

In the note (covered by The Business Insider blogger Nicholas Carlson), TBI Research analyst Rory Maher said that the revenue estimate “demonstrates the strong growth potential [for] social media and local online advertising.” TBI Research is a part of The Business Insider.

TBI believes that Facebook’s success is coming from branded display advertising with premium CPMs; a strong self-serve ad program offering deep targeting; and attractive viral advertising programs. In addition, Facebook generates revenue through search and the sale of virtual gifts.

Of course, Facebook’s enormous growth over the past several months also has something to do with that. It now has more than 350 million users worldwide.

The local angle is of critical importance. Facebook now has enough mass that it can be an effective targeting tool for small businesses and local businesses. Based on personal experience, the ads can be quite sophisticated. I regularly see ads that know I have kids and that I live in Seattle. Today I saw an ad that knew that I am a fan of the Facebook page for “The Amazing Race.” I don’t find these ads creepy or invasive at all.

One thing the TBI Research note doesn’t really cover is mobile. So far mobile hasn’t been a factor in Facebook’s revenue stream, but many of its members access Facebook from their mobile phone. I expect Facebook will sell mobile advertising in the near future. Also still on the horizon are potential revenue streams from ecommerce, virtual currency and more.

Facebook has already been on a strong revenue trajectory in the second half of 2009. In May, I had projected that marketers would spend $300 million worldwide to advertise on Facebook in 2009. Clearly Facebook has blown well past that figure. How high will it go this year and next year? I’ll have more details soon, when my next social network ad spending report comes out.

One thing is certain: Based on my recent discussions with agency executives and other industry insiders, Facebook is now the premier destination for marketers who are using social media.

As companies build out their social media strategy for 2010 and beyond, many millions of dollars will be spent to develop and manage Facebook fan pages. The question will be just how much marketers will spend to buy paid advertising on the site. Facebook will need to keep pumping out the ad innovations, and it will need to give marketers proof that the advertising works.

During the course of last week we weighed in on several trends to watch in 2010. Here’s a quick and tidy round-up of those predictions.

• Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey: During 2010, as US ad budgets crack open just a little, look for an accelerated migration of ad dollars from traditional to digital media. Advertising on social networks will never attract a large share of marketers’ ad dollars, while the classic interruption/disruption model of advertising, whereby marketers insert unwanted, usually irrelevant ads as a price the consumer must pay to view desired content, will erode, if not fade away.



• Social Media: Marketers will demand better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media—the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers share about the brand online. Search will get more social in several ways: by including real-time content in results (e.g., Twitter posts), adding information from social network friends to results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevance. These trends will yield new ad formats that may incorporate friends’ viewpoints or interactions directly into the ad—and will raise new red flags among privacy advocates. (Read more…)

The travel industry is showing slight signs of a rebound, at least, if Web traffic is any indicator. Compete recently released data which shows that while differing travel categories (hotel, cruise, air, car rental) are recovering at different rates, all categories are seeing an increase in aggregate unique visitors this year compared to 2008. From Compete’s blog:

In summary, all four categories are showing signs of recovery, and in general consumer research levels are leading indicators. But results here are based on domain level visits: a deeper assessment would include consumer engagement (deeper funnel steps like conducting a search or choosing an itinerary) and actual bookings. A true recovery will be supported by more overall research by travelers, more engagement, and more bookings – coupled with a return of pricing power.

Many consumers are still opting to stay at home, while others say they are reducing the amount of money spent on leisure travel by researching deals online before purchasing. As we recently wrote in our Daily Newsletter, “52% [of US Internet users] told About.com that, like in 2008, they would not travel this holiday season, another 24% said they were even less likely to travel this year than last. Money-saving attitudes, unsurprisingly, have an effect on what kinds of ads are most likely to reach consumers. Asked which online travel advertisements they were most interested in, large majorities of respondents wanted coupons on big-ticket travel items: airfare and hotels.”

(Read more…)

Behind eMarketer’s updated US online ad spending estimates are a plethora of intertwined forces, both cyclical and structural.

The main cyclical force is the recession and its impact on both consumers and companies. However, the economic cycle has reached bottom — at least for the online ad industry. Recovery will be slow, though, which will suppress spending on key ad formats such as search, banners, and classified ads.

The main structural force is the move toward more non-advertising marketing. That is particularly true in the online space, where marketers are focusing more on social media and building up their Websites or brand microsites. For that reason, the spending numbers alone can be misleading because they fail to capture the full extent of online marketing’s growth.

The five prime trends that support eMarketer’s ad spending estimates are:

• Diverse Internet advertising. In eMarketer’s bottom-up model for Internet ad spending estimates, which develops the total from its constituent parts, the recession and ongoing structural changes are creating varying spending patterns for the individual elements. For example, while we project paid search spending to rise by 2.2% in 2009, classified ads will be down by 30.2%. And while classifieds are typically unsung, they represent the third-largest online ad format. Video is the only ad format that will get double-digit growth this year, at 40.2%, as brand advertisers look for effective ways to get out their message on the Web.
• Branding shortfalls. Based on Advertising Age’s annual “100 Leading National Advertisers” report, with data compiled by TNS Media Intelligence, only 25.7% of online display dollars in 2008 came from the country’s largest advertisers, down from 29.3% in 2007. That means the top 100 put 5.9% of their total measured media ad budgets into display ads in 2008, a tiny amount relative to the potential impact of these “rich” advertisers.
• Pricing trends. The largest share of online ad spending comes from direct marketing methods, specifically search and classifieds. That trend is reflected in the shift from CPM pricing — which is normally how brand advertising such as banners, rich media and video is sold — to performance pricing. Based on user actions, such as clicks, performance-priced ads usually cost less than CPM ads.
• Ad networks. Another factor to consider is the spread of ad networks, which nearly always reduce CPM pricing significantly compared with direct sales by Web publishers. A key reason behind ad network expansion is the corresponding rise of online advertising inventory — more Websites, more pages, more traffic.
• Publisher revenues. While Google’s US net revenues in the first three quarters of 2009 were up by 4.3% year over year, Yahoo’s plummeted by 13.2% and AOL dropped by 11.8% in the same period. When you consider that 71% of total Internet revenues in the first half of 2009 came from only 10 Websites, spending losses among even only a few major sites can significantly shape the big picture.