Social Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti

This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search.  The speaker is:

• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.

Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally.  I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward.  Seems like something a search guy would understand, right?  I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.

I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.

Bullet Point Review!

• In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US.  Now it’s more spread out.
• Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
• Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
• Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
• America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
• 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
• Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
• Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
• MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
• Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
• 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
• 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
• Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
• 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
• There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
• 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
• Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
• Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
• Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie  it to a social media strategy.
• Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
• Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
• Search is a logical and desired outcome.
• The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
• A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
• Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued.  Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid.  There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.
• Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?

Last complaint, I swear!  If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds.  There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down.  Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure.  I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.