I’ve decided to research and write a Forrester report on how financial services marketers can most effectively use social media. We’ll be including lots of our data on how different types of financial customers engage with social media, of course — but I’d also like to collect more insight from the marketers’ perspective.

If you’re a financial services marketer, and you’re willing to walk us through examples of how you’ve used social media, talk to us about how you manage risk and work with your legal and compliance departments, and share with us some of the lessons you’ve learned in social media marketing, then we’d love to talk to you. You can contact me directly at: nelliott at forrester dot com. Thanks!

In researching this report, I learned that:

• Canadians are the most active social networkers in any market we survey. In our Social Technographics Ladder, we refer to those who regularly use social networks as ‘joiners.’ And Canada boasts a higher percentage of joiners than any of the other 12 countries we regularly survey: 57% of Canadians told us they use social networks at least once each month. (The next strongest social networking market is the US, where 51% are joiners.) Canada also has more ‘creators,’ critics,’ and ’spectators’ than many other countries. [Just a note to avoid confusion: while Canadians are the strongest adopters of social networks we've found in our surveys, they are not the strongest users of social media overall (which would include not just social networks but also blogs and other social platforms) -- that would be the South Koreans.]
• Many Canadian marketers have been using social media for years. With all those socially engaged consumers, it’s no surprise Canadian marketers have been pretty aggressive in adopting social media too. The report includes several great examples of marketers successfully using social media, and I found that some of the most innovative marketers (like Vancity and Molson) have been leveraging social media for 3 or 4 years now.

One of my favorite examples of social media marketing in Canada comes from the political realm. NDP leader Jack Layton recognized that his followers were among the most socially engaged in Canada, as you’ll see below. So he used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to energize NDP voters before the 2008 federal election — and that helped the party gain 31% more seats in Ottawa than they’d had in the previous government.

Go and have a play with the Social Technographics Profile Tool and you can find free cuts of this data by age and gender. (Forrester clients can also ask us to cut the data by other factors, like where people bank, which mobile carrier they use, or what province they live in.)

And if you’ve got any other great examples of social media marketing in Canada, let me know in the comments below.

In the weeks leading up to the playoffs, fans started talking online about organizing a series of playoff tweet-ups — and the league’s Director of Social Media Mike DiLorenzo jumped at the chance to make it happen. Mike planned a big tweet-up in New York on the opening night of the playoffs, complete with food and beer sponsors and hockey merchandise giveaways — and started promoting the event on Twitter.

To make sure there were lots of tweet-ups happening around the league, Mike reached out to a handful of influential hockey fans in key NHL markets to recruit their participation. Lots of fans also stepped up and volunteered to host events in their cities too. Before long, there were tweet-ups organized in almost two dozen cities around the world. The league supported every one of those tweet-ups by sending gift bags, coupons for discounts at shop.NHL.com, and signed hockey merchandise for event organizers to raffle.

The NHL spent only a few weeks and a few thousand dollars planning and supporting the tweet-ups, but the results were fantastic:

• Big in-person attendance. More than 1200 people attended tweet-ups in 23 cities (including events in New Zealand and Northern Ireland) for the opening night of the playoffs. Many fans organized further tweet-ups as their teams progressed through the playoffs as well
• Bigger online chatter. Those attendees talked a lot about the events on Twitter: On the opening night of the playoffs, the term “NHL” was mentioned on Twitter more than twice as often as on a normal day. And #NHLtweetup became a trending topic for the day.
• Enormous total reach. According to the league’s research, as many as 240,000 people could have heard about the event on Twitter. And the tweet-ups also generated press coverage that reached millions, including a story in USA Today.

So, what can other marketers learn from the NHL’s success? We think there are a number of important lessons here:

1. Get your brand advocates involved. The NHL’s tweet-ups wouldn’t have worked without its fans. The fans helped develop the idea, and they did all the legwork for these events — including finding venues and promoting the events. If the NHL had tried to organize these events itself, it would’ve cost a lot more money, and probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
2. Give yourself enough lead time. The NHL and its tweet-up hosts had only three weeks to organize these events — and it was a pretty hectic three weeks. The league plans to organize a lot more tweet-ups this season, and will start planning each six to eight weeks in advance.
3. Make sure PR is part of your strategy. The fans who attended the tweet-ups generated a lot of excitement about the playoffs — both at the events, and on Twitter. But the mainstream press coverage provided a ton of reach. The media is still in love with Twitter, so inviting them to the events can really pay off.

There’s some other great coverage of the event online — including that at Goaliegirl.com — and Forrester clients should read the entire case study for even more details and best practices. Congratulations to the NHL, and to all its tweet-up organizers, on a great event.

The fact is, social media marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight into which metrics are important, it’s not surprising that marketers feel overwhelmed.

Most marketers fixate on easily-available measures like followers or fans — regardless of whether those metrics are important. Many others fail to measure obviously useful numbers just because they’re not on the first page of a report. A marketer focused on talking [video] should have a radically different definition of success than one focused on embracing [video]. But marketers are much more likely to tailor their social media measurement to the tools they’re using than to the objectives they’re trying to achieve. Have a look — most marketers measure pretty much the same metrics, no matter what their objective:

Most marketers measure the same social media metrics, regardless of their objective

It’s obvious that marketers need more clarity into which social media metrics they should be tracking. So we’ve developed a three-step process to help marketers better tailor their measurement strategies to the objectives they’re pursuing. Walking through these three steps will help you cut through the clutter on your marketing reports and measure your social media initiatives more effectively:

• Step 1: Think back to your marketing objective. Go back and find your notes from when you were first planning your social marketing effort — and remind yourself of the objective you were pursuing. If you don’t know what your goal was, you’ll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded.
• Step 2: Consider what types of metrics signal success. Don’t think about specific lines on a report yet — instead, think about what types of consumer behaviors and sentiments match your objectives, and focus your measurement on those categories of metrics. If your goal was energizing, success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand; if your goal was supporting, you want to know if users were providing good advice to each other — and whether it kept users from having to ask you for support directly.  Again, this isn’t about specific metrics, it’s about how you hoped your social initiative would change your relationship with consumers.
• Step 3: Look for that category of metric in the social technology you’re using. Once you’ve identified the type of metric that will signal success, then you can look for ways to track those metrics within the social platform you’re using. This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report Facebook or Jive gives you are most important — and which other vendors you need to use to find the exact numbers you’re looking for.

In my new Forrester Research report, ‘Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing,’ I offer a framework that helps marketers place social media metrics into one of six categories, shows them which categories of metrics should be used to measure which objectives, and gives examples of how to obtain those metrics from each social platform. I hope clients use my framework; I think it will make their lives easier and their measurement more successful.

But the key message of that report (and this blog post) isn’t the framework, it’s this call to action: We as an industry must do better at measuring social media marketing. Social media budgets keep rising, but that trend won’t continue forever if we can’t prove that social initiatives are effective. Perhaps more important, if we don’t know which social applications succeeded and which didn’t, we can’t learn from our experiences and improve on future efforts. And it’s surprisingly easy to measure social media effectively: we just need to focus on measuring objectives rather than technologies.

Whether you use the detailed framework in my report, or simply keep these three steps in mind as you design your own measurement strategy, I hope these ideas help you sift through all the social media metrics that are available, and find the right ones to measure your efforts.

But I don’t want my report to be just about data — I also want to call out some of the best examples of social media marketing in Canada, and show how savvy marketers have put social media to work for them. In the year I’ve been working in Canada, I’ve been lucky enough to see some great social marketing initiatives from marketers like RBC, Teligence, Sunshine Village, Servus Credit Union, and others. But I’ve already written about those — so I need some fresh examples for this new report!

If you’ve worked on, or know of, some great examples of social marketing in Canada, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an e-mail: nelliott at forrester dot com.  Or leave a note in the comments below.

I found marketers using a range of strategies to create offline influence, but there are two in particular that are most promising:

1. Events. If you want to create a big splash for a new product or service, tweet-ups and house parties are a great strategy for reaching a lot of people quickly. For instance, the NHL worked with fans to run a series of 23 simulatenous tweet-ups to celebrate the opening of the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs — and attracted more than a thousand attendees, generated a potential Twitter reach of more than 200,000, and garnered press coverage that reached millions. And right now, Microsoft is working with a company called House Party to plan in-home launch parties for its new Windows 7 operating system.
2. Ambassador programs. If you want to build long-term relationships and ongoing influence, ambassador programs might be the right strategy for you. For instance, scissor maker Fiskars found a great way to turn members of its legendary Fisk-a-teers online community into offline ambassadors: they gave each member a special pair of scissors engraved with their member number. When the Fisk-a-teers go to crafting parties and pull out their special scissors, it invariably creates a conversation about the brand. Vendors like BzzAgent can drive offline sampling and evangelism for marketers. And even Facebook has used ambassador programs in some markets where it’s been slow to grow.

Forrester clients can learn more — including lots more examples, and our best practices for offline influence programs — by reading the full research report. And I’ll also be speaking on this topic at both Forrester’s 2009 Consumer Forum (in Chicago, October 27 and 28) and our 2009 EMEA Marketing Forum (in London, November 17 and 18).  I just finished writing a case study on the NHL’s tweet-ups as well.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: what are you favorite examples of brands driving offline word of mouth? Have you ever run an offline influence program – and if so, what vendors did you use and how did it work? Let me know in the comments below.

• There’s a lot of rich media being served – but most of it’s not very rich. DoubleClick says that in 2008, less than 40% of the impressions it served were GIFs or JPEGs. So does that mean the other 60% were rich media? Not according to DoubleClick: it says 55% of its 2008 impressions were “simple Flash” ads. Just 6% of the impressions served in 2008 were rich enough to be labeled “rich media.”
• Rich media ads that incorporate video are usually your best choice. This creative format was most effective on nearly every brand metric, including aided and unaided awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent. The only time not to use rich media with video? Surprisingly, when you’re looking to build message association an old-fashioned GIF or JPEG is by far the most effective format.
• If your Flash ads don’t include video or interaction, don’t bother. When you add up  performance across all the brand metrics studied, simple Flash ads provide less brand impact than any other format – even GIFs and JPEGs. It turns out all those advertisers who served simple Flash ads through DoubleClick last year could’ve saved themselves some time and hassle by simply producing animated GIFs.

If you’ve had a look at the report, let me know in the comments below what you found interesting or surprising – and whether you’ll change your creative strategy based on the findings.

Chances are you’ve seen an online video contest lately. In fact, you’ve probably seen a lot of them: more than 20% of interactive marketers — including category leaders like P&G, Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony — tell Forrester they’ve run campaigns asking users to submit online content in the past year. I’ve been collecting a list of dozens of great video contests, and one contest clearinghouse site says there are 115 user-generated video contests accepting submissions right now, across a huge range of categories:

Some of these contests — like Tourism Queensland’s Cannes-Lion-winning “The Best Job in the World” contest, or Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” contest — generate a lot of media coverage. But there are many hundreds more each year, promoting everything from steak sauce to psoriasis research, that don’t get as much notoriety.

Why are so many marketers running online video contests? Because users love online contests almost as much as they love online video — and because user-generated video contests can help marketers achieve a huge range of marketing objectives.

Video contests let marketers listen to their customers and learn about their needs — like student loan provider Access Group, which asked law students to enter videos about their concerns and then used insights from those videos to create its “Student Loans, No Worries” ad campaign. Contests can help marketers energize users an drive a viral marketing effect — like Servus Credit Union, which encouraged entrants to develop their own marketing campaigns to drum up votes, and found the three finalists generated as much publicity as the credit union’s PR firm did. And they can give marketers access to cheap, original online video content — like ski resort Sunshine Village, which used its contest to generate a video library of its mountain’s trails and terrain.

Of course, not every video contest succeeds. They often take months to plan, they can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 or more, and they usually require the coordinated efforts of several internal departments and external vendors. And if you don’t get the “three Ps” right (choosing the right premise, offering the right prize, and picking the right promotional strategy) you could fall flat on your face.

I’ve spent the last two months studying hundreds of contests, and have just published two new Forrester research studies on the topic. User-Generated Video Contests: Best Practices For Driving More Entries And Creating Viral Impact is designed to help marketers understand which users they should target with video contests, what goals they can achieve, and how to get the most value from their contests. Video Contest Checklist: How To Choose The Right Premise, Prize, And Promotion For Your Contest contains a checklist that guides marketers through every single step in the contest process — including choosing a contest premise, selecting a prize, planning a promotional strategy, choosing a voting structure, picking a vendor, setting a schedule, establishing a budget, getting internal buy-in, and measuring the results.

Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing some of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my research — including the best promotional strategies I’ve seen, and mini-case studies on what makes contests successful — here on my personal blog.

In the meantime, if you’ve been thinking of running a user-generated video contest — or if I’ve convinced you it’s a good idea — drop me a line (nelliott at forrester dot com). I’d be happy to work with you on making your video contest a success.

My Forrester colleague Sean Corcoran stirred up a bit of controversy recently with his research on sponsored conversations — a.k.a. paying bloggers to discuss your products. (The 20,000-foot view of that research: the practice is here to stay — in fact it’s growing — so everyone involved must ensure there’s full disclosure, and follow other best practices.) But until recently, I’d only ever heard of sponsored blogging and sponsored twittering. So I was fascinated to hear that fast food chain Carl’s Jr. is running a new sponsored YouTube video campaign.

Carl’s Jr. — no stranger, of course, to pushing boundaries in online video — recruited YouTube stars and gave them a simple mission: make a video about how you eat hamburgers, and mention the chain’s new portobello mushroom burger. They won’t say how many video creators they’ve engaged for the campaign, or how much they’re paying each. But they expect the videos to generate a total of more than 10 million views.

Considering how difficult it is to launch a successful viral video campaign, this approach makes a lot of sense: the marketer is guaranteeing itself lots of reach, and the videos will carry a reasonable level of authenticity and trust. And they appear to be following the best practices that Sean laid out in his report — which might just be enough to keep the critics at bay. I’ll be watching to see how this campaign works out for Carl’s Jr. — and whether YouTube finds a way to take control of this practice and turn it into a viable revenue stream.

What do you think — how do sponsored YouTube videos compare to sponsored blogging and sponsored twittering? And would you pay YouTube stars to make a video about your product?