research

What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

The Goods May Be Virtual, but the Profit Is Real

Recently, I’ve posted a number of articles on this trend, and yet more reinforcement keeps popping up. This is a look at gaming, particularly social gaming. While the article doesn’t delve into it’s counterpart, console gaming, it’s not hard to connect the dots. Currently console gaming companies spending 100s of millions to launch a title, selling them at a high cost — often $40 or more. And like the movie industry, they lose money on most of their productions, making it back on a few hits. By contrast, social gaming sites product games that are free, played by millions, and then make their money selling small items for a buck or two. Their investment is less, so they don’t need enormous sales to recoup it. Zynga, the leader in this space and producer of games like Mafia Wars, says only 3% of those who play actually make a purchase. Yet they’re profitable. I think entertainment companies need to address this model, and stop trying to pull as much profit from as few people as they can, and start trying to get a little money from a lot of people. A great change would be to simultaneously make movies available in theaters, via download and on DVD. Capture the excitement while it’s there, realizing that there are potentially millions of people who want to see the movie, but just never make it out to the theater.

Weber Shandwick’s Inline Social Media Melting Pot

Good information, if not that surprising. What did take me back was the number of accounts the 73 Twitter-active companies have set up. 540. That’s an AVERAGE of over 7 accounts per company. And while the report overall has some good insights — I think they’re right on about companies just spouting off brand information and not really having a conversation — there are some aspects of the report that I feel are skewing the data. Namely, they look at absolute Tweets and Followers, not relative figures based on a recent time period. Twitter is still an emerging technology, and as such, many of these accounts could have been set up in the past 6 months. So unless the company has been posting at a very heavy rate, they likely wouldn’t have that much activity in aggregate to rank high in this study. I think brands can get a lot of value out of Twitter without posting at a level that, say, @garyvee posts (Over 60 posts a day average over the past week). And if you’re one of those brands, you didn’t look that good in this survey.

New Facebook Inbox Increases Response Rates For Page Updates

Insightful comparison between response rates for email newsletters (the opt-in variety) and Facebook Page Updates. While newsletters draw significantly higher response rates, they’re typically sent out with much less frequency.

Twitter Analyzer | Twitter Statistics | Twitter Analytics

One of the more interesting Twitter stats tools I’ve seen recently. A lot of information, although like most of the tools, it’s a little kludgey, and some of the data being presented could be more thought out in terms of whether or not that information is really helpful in making a Twitter use analysis.

On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors – HarvardBusiness.org

A dissection of how corporate America structures are changing, from more rigid vertical hierarchies, to interpersonal networks that can expand across multiple companies and disciplines. There’s a strong leadership undercurrent to this, exemplified by the following blurb:

“Wherever teamwork across positions is desirable, natural connectors who instinctively reach across divides to form relationships get the plum jobs, on small sports teams as well as in large companies. For example, on the North Carolina women’s soccer team, a perennial winner among college teams, Jordan Walker was a team leader because she was a connector who helped other players work together, even though Coach Anson Dorrance called her one of the least athletic players he had ever seen.”