social media » 2/3 » NDG Communications, Inc.

Sara Badr,
NDG Marketing Manager

Big news in the social media realm: No longer are the days that you must share information in the form of status updates with hundreds of friends or acquaintances all at once. Google launched a trial of their new Google+ social network to a limited number of users this week.

Now, Google+ wants you to be able to connect with others in more ways than one. The new social network includes features such as a news feed known as “the Stream,” video chat in “Hangouts,” and the ability to group chat on mobile devices with the “Huddle” option.

The creators at Google+ also recognized that you may only what to share something with a certain group of friends. For example, maybe you want to brief industry professionals or interested clients on an upcoming meeting you’re holding. With Google+, you’re able to group friends into various social groups or categories called “Circles” and relay information to those people only.

Google+ will gradually open up to the public over the coming weeks. Will you try it out?

Big news for homebuilders and developers engaged in social media: According to the new Spring 2011 tracking survey from The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, African-American and Latino internet users are significantly more likely than whites to be users of the micro-blogging/status update service Twitter.

The survey revealed that the Twitter adoption gap between African-Americans and whites has increased significantly, even just over the past six months: “In November 2010, there was an eight percentage point difference in Twitter use between African-American and white internet users (13% for blacks vs. 5% for whites),” whereas by May 2011, that gap had increased to 16 percentage points—25% of online African-Americans are now using Twitter, compared with only 9% of online whites.

The big takeaway: One in ten African-American internet users now use Twitter on a typical day—double the rate for Latinos and almost four times the rate for whites, so it may be time to rethink who your audience is, where they are socializing online, and how—the survey also found that more than 50% of Twitter users now access the service via a mobile phone or device.

You can access the entire Pew Research Center Spring 2011 survey here.

What we’ve recently learned that we wanted to share with our clients:

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, African-Americans as a demographic group are now the leading early adopters of mobile technology in the United States compared to other groups, increasingly using mobile phones to access the web and perform online tasks, and making wider use of social media—far exceeding their Caucasian counterparts’ usage and daily frequency.

What this means to you, and why it’s important to your business:

Since African-Americans are now more likely than other groups to watch content on their mobile devices, more likely to try new mobile apps, and more likely to use their social networks to share rich content, NDG believes our real estate and homebuilder clients who operate in predominately African-American markets should begin testing a number of developing digital channels to engage prospects within this demographic, such as using QR codes on model home signage or flyers that can be scanned to quickly take a mobile user to video tours of home models, and allocating more pay-per-click/online advertising dollars to mobile media channels where African-American homebuyers are shopping and researching.

If your company operates in predominately African-American markets, then we believe it’s time to up your game, take more risks, and try new things that click with mobile users—this demographic is ready and waiting for mobile content and activity. Now is the time to set your company apart and create new connections by being an early mobile adopter too.

The Details:

The results of a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project revealed that African-Americans are among the “most active users of the mobile web.” The survey found that mobile phone ownership is higher among African-Americans than among whites and that “minority cell phone owners take advantage of a much greater range of their phones’ features compared with white mobile phone users.”

At least 64% of African-Americans now access the internet from a laptop or mobile phone

African-American mobile phone owners are significantly more likely than Caucasians to use non-voice data applications on their mobile devices and they also take advantage of a wider range of mobile phone features compared with Caucasians

African-Americans are more likely than all other groups to use their mobile devices to share and consume multimedia content

54% use their phone to send photos or video on their phone

20% watch video on their mobile phone

15% post photos or videos online on their phone

Getting Involved with the D.C. Advertising & Design Scene

Beverly Kitchens,
NDG Art Director

There are several active and vibrant advertising & design organizations in the D.C. metro area, all offering a wide range of activities, including networking happy hours, awards shows, portfolio reviews, and educational seminars. Everyone has something to learn, and to teach, and these organizations are important not only for nurturing young talent, but also to ensure that our industry has access to a skilled, driven, and innovative workforce.

Recently, NDG Creative Director Quintin Parrish and I were honored to be a part of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington Portfolio Review Day, where we had the opportunity to review portfolios of recent graduates from the D.C. area, and even a few who traveled a greater distance from central Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. It was a great chance to meet some fresh talent and provide critical feedback that would hopefully help these graduates land their first professional design and advertising jobs.

And even more recently, NDG Graphic Designer Erika Bilbo and I attended FUTAD: The Future of Advertising, sponsored by AD2DC. This was an incredibly informative seminar focusing on emerging technologies and the pivotal role that social media will continue to play in advertising. FUTAD featured a panel of speakers from advertising and digital firms from across the nation, and each of their perspectives were unique and revealing.

If you’d like to attend events like these and rub shoulders with other D.C. area advertising types, designers, copywriters, programmers, and more, we’ve created a short list of some of the best resources in our area so you too can become more involved, learn more, connect with others, be a mentor, and give back.

Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington (ADCMW)

Key events: Career Day, The Real Show student competition, DC Paper Show, Annual Show competition, online design publication Full Bleed http://fullbleed.adcmw.org/

American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

Key events: National Design Week, Career Day, film screenings, Show Off: Annual Student Competition, Urban Forest Project, AIGA50 competition

DC Ad Club

Key events: The ADDYs Advertising Awards, Advertising Week DC, Best of DC Series

Ad2DC

Ad2DC is a subgroup of the DC Ad Club, specifically for young professionals in the DC area under the age of 32. Key events: FUTAD: The Future of Advertising, Tips & Tricks, Water Cooler Wednesdays

Continuing our Step-By-Step Process to Staying Focused and On Track in Today’s Market, this week, we’ll discuss how Social Media can help you distribute your content online to help achieve your search engine marketing and optimization goals, as well as help you achieve real authentic customer engagement.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter—there’s a growing number of social media channels and platforms out there. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and off course trying to be everywhere, so we’re going to set the record straight about what you should, and shouldn’t, expect from your social media marketing efforts.

Make sure to review NDG’s online integration map for flowing data (content) throughout the fundamental online marketing components for Homebuilders, Developers, and Real Estate Brokerages.

NDG recommends that our clients have a living strategic plan for implementing, engaging, and monitoring your social media outreach. While social media can help build brands and maximize publicity efforts, do not expect these marketing components to instantly drive traffic or sales. Social media platforms are recommended because of their word-of-mouth generation capabilities and because of their wide-ranging reach across many varied demographic audiences. Do NOT abandon all other forms of marketing; rather, integrate social media into your current marketing strategy and, most importantly, your corporate website.

As a first, fundamental step, develop a blog to serve as the “content repository” to feed timely, relevant content to your corporate website. This same content can be distributed via a Facebook fan page. Then, you can add other platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to your mix as you develop more content appropriate for these digital meeting places. Your website is the hub of all your marketing and advertising, and from this hub are distributed communications, each tailored to the channel you’re using.

Finally, remember that Content is Queen, and especially so for the social media. If you’re just shouting the same stuff down these channels, you’re wasting your time and money, and potentially damaging your brand and reputation. The ROI on your social media outreach will be directly influenced by your investment in generating good content, because this is what will help your Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) rankings grow higher and higher, and create more authentic engagement with your prospects—not repeating the same weak content over and over, which will just get you ignored by both your prospects and the search engines.

The following is a guest blog from our friend and colleague Mike Lyon over at DoYouConvert:

Many of you are squeezing social media so hard that you have forgotten about the old-fashioned email marketing campaign. Are you thinking, with all of these status updates, tweets, article postings, video sharing, and more—we just don’t need the email campaigns like we used to?

Lately, I have received an increase in requests to speak to homebuilders about using social media to generate new home sales. It’s the topic du jour. In my presentations, I always start with this thought:

Even though we are here to talk about social media and how you can leverage that network, the bottom line is, homebuyers are not going out to search for a home on Facebook. You must have a solid foundation and a bulletproof online sales program, before you invest all of your time and effort building a social media campaign.

One of the key Internet marketing tools in your Online Sales Program is your email marketing. If you aren’t sending out monthly campaigns to potential customers, realtors, and past customers, you are missing valuable opportunities.

But Mike, we have 1,000 followers on Twitter and 400 Facebook fans. They all see our stuff, is the response I get. But does your post stick around? No, which is why email campaigns are so great.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of this traditional form of marketing (funny that email campaigns are now considered traditional).

Email campaigns are targeted. Unlike a tweet, you can guarantee that email recipients almost always see the subject line. Your challenge is to make that subject line engaging enough for the recipient to want to open it.

Email campaigns are more permanent. When the email is in someone’s inbox, they have to delete it to get rid of it. A Facebook status update or an article will disappear on its own. So, in this case, an email lives until the recipient takes action.

Email campaigns have more real estate. Emails offer more space to talk about your message link to other information, and add enticing images, which is much more powerful than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter. You can track effectiveness with email campaigns. Tracking an email’s effectiveness is easier and less time-consuming than tracking the ROI of social media.

You can take action with email campaigns. With a targeted email message, you can actually see who opens and clicks through to the specific link. When you drill down into that data, you can then pick up the phone, call the prospect or realtor and talk about the subject immediately. Very powerful stuff!

If you really want to go old school, look at direct mail. When done correctly, it can still be very effective. Like a diverse portfolio, you must always keep your marketing program well rounded. Just because there is a great new technology or a new advertising medium, it doesn’t mean the old method is useless. You always have to look at the return on time and investment to determine its value for you or your company. What old school methods still work for you?

There is some pretty big news in the “March 2009 Global Faces and Networked Places” report on social networking from Nielsen, one of the leading global marketing and media information companies.

According to the report, “two-thirds of the world’s internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time….That percentage is likely to grow as time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall internet growth.” The report goes on to state that time spent on social media sites has overtaken personal e-mail “to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals, and PC software applications.”

Transversely, however, the report identifies a not totally unsuspected trend: As these social networking sites become more attractive to advertisers, they become “less appealing to members who see highly-targeted ads as invading privacy.” Consumers are actually growing less tolerant to advertising on social media. And, more social media users now consider advertising on social networking sites to be an intrusion; even the number of those respondents who don’t mind being served ads if they are relevant to their interests is dropping.

What does this mean for smart marketers? That content, and the way it is delivered and transmitted, is becoming more complex than ever—and that companies must undertake careful studies of these channels before engaging them. Additionally, it also seems to indicate (though indirectly) that the e-mail component of any online campaign must be fully considered in the context of greater social media usage, necessitating more formal integration of e-mail content with social media content.

Over at the excellent Smartblog on Social Media, Rob Birgfeld is examining exactly how sharing is going on between users—and explaining why your customers are the best marketers money can’t buy. According to Rob, “If you’re mindful of how and where they share, you’ll have true word-of-mouth working on your behalf.” Read the whole article Here.