Speaking Sensis

I’d like to officially welcome Yelp to Australia today, a global leader in local ratings and reviews. I encourage everyone to visit www.yelp.com.au and share their experiences of local businesses by posting ratings and reviews.

Why rate and review? Aside from the fact that it’s the fun and easy way to talk about great (and not so great) local businesses, it’s sites like Yelp that are playing a big part in how we Aussies make purchasing decisions these days.

According to the Sensis® Social Media Report, social networkers read an average of six reviews before making a buying decision. So rather than waiting for a review of a business to be published online or in the local paper and then deciding whether or not to give the business a go, we are getting on the front foot and seeking these reviews out for ourselves. Yelp.com.au makes this very easy. 

Yelp first started in San Francisco in 2004 and today’s launch in Australia marks the 13th country it has opened its online doors in. In Q3 2011 the online ratings and reviews company received an average of 61 million visitors a month (up 63 per cent from the same time last year), has generated 22 million reviews on its global network as of September 2011 (an increase of 66 per cent over the same time in 2010) and saw an average of five million unique views a month on its mobile app. With results like these, it’s evident that ratings and reviews are becoming an increasingly important component of consumers’ pre-purchase behaviour.

While I’m personally excited about Yelp’s launch in Australia today, it’s also a big coup for Sensis®’ Yellow Pages®, after announcing our ground-breaking partnership with Yelp back in July. 

Yellow Pages® local business listing data has been integrated into Yelp.com.au (including mobile site and apps), which means our Yellow Pages® advertisers will be able to be found by more potential customers. And in a couple of weeks, Yelp Reviews and Ratings will be displayed on Yellow Pages® Online and Mobile. I’ll tell you more about that shortly. In the meantime, visit www.yelp.com.au to rate and review a local business near you.

Sensis’ and Yelp partner to create new opportunities for Australia’s local searchers.

Today is an exciting day for Sensis as we announce our latest ground-breaking partnership between Yellow Pages® and Yelp, the global leader in local reviews and ratings. Together we’ll work with Yelp to launch an Australian version of the Yelp website, where Aussie’s will be invited to rate their dealings with local businesses and write reviews about their experiences.

Ratings and reviews are growing in popularity in the Australian market place. Did you know that, according to the recent Sensis Social Media Report, almost two thirds of social network users (63 per cent) read online reviews before they make buying decisions? Or that they read an average of six reviews each time? Given this enormous interest, we believe this partnership will be a huge win for the Australian community.

When Yelp launches in Australia they will integrate Sensis’ Yellow Pages® local business listing data into yelp.com.au.and, tap into our leading local sales force to launch and embed yelp.com.au in the Australian market. 

Not only does this mean the launch of a leading new ratings and review website in Australia, but through the partnership, Sensis will syndicate Yelp content, ratings and reviews to yellowpages.com.au, Yellow Pages® Mobile and the Yellow Pages® iPhone application.

So our advertisers can be really excited about the opportunities this partnership presents to them in the form of a deeper way to engage with potential customers online.

Yelp is a really exciting business to work with and I’m personally looking forward to the next couple of months as we work together to bring this leading product to market.

Yelp launched in 2004 and has rapidly expanded its user-generated ratings and reviews websites across North America and Europe. In fact, in June 2011, Yelp had more than 53 million unique visitors worldwide and to date more than 20 million local reviews of businesses have been posted to Yelp sites.

We anticipate yelp.com.au will be fully operational by the end of 2011 with Sensis’ Yellow Pages® media advisors offering Yelp advertising options to customers in 2012.

Simon B

The Sensis® Social Media Report backs up the views of social media experts by showing that engagement is critical to social marketing.

One of the most significant findings of the Sensis® Social Media Report is that consumer uptake of social media far outstrips business uptake. This leads to the conclusion that Australian businesses need to do more to ‘follow the audience’.

But, how?

For a long time, the experts have been telling us the secret is engagement: being able to connect with consumers in a relationship that benefits all.

And the Sensis® Social Media Report bears this out.

Overall, Australian social media users seem roughly split on the legitimacy of advertising in social media. About half don’t like it, while the other half either don’t mind or welcome it.

That’s not so bad. But the skies become less sunny when you consider that only 29% of people say they take notice of advertising on social media. And (coincidentally), only 29% say they sometimes click on social media ads.

In other words, while the acceptance of social media advertising isn’t too bad, we’ve got a fair way to go before it becomes really effective.

So does that mean the social media doors are closed for marketers?

Absolutely not!

You see, in the midst of all this advertising apathy, 63% of social media users say they read online reviews and blogs when searching for information about products and services.

And those consumers expect to read an average of six reviews before making a decision.

But that’s not all. Social media users also have a voracious appetite for something extra. 57% want discounts, 45% want give-aways, 41% want invitations to events and 36% want coupons.

In other words, while social media users aren’t reacting to ads, they’re really big on information and incentives.

And that’s where the opportunity lies. There’s value to be had for marketers who try to be useful, rather than try to be snappy.

And that value can be magnified if you can meet people’s needs so well that they openly advocate for you. That’s because, 27% of Internet users have provided online ratings while 24% have posted an online review or blog.

As everyone keeps saying, the potential for social media marketing is huge. But to unlock that value, we need to see consumers as targets for service, not targets for spin.

Okay, have a guess. Which Australian state is first past the post when it comes to social media?

Too easy. With their higher population and access to technology, it’d be NSW and Victoria in a canter.

Right?

Wrong.

In fact the Sensis® Social Media Report has found that our two most populous states sit in the middle when it comes to most measures of social media uptake.

And that there’s one state that stands head and shoulders above the rest… Tasmania.

To show you what I mean, here is a roll call of leading states in the social media stakes.

Most connected: Tasmania
100% of Tasmanians access the Internet. The national average is 94%.

Most social (consumers): Tasmania (by a mile!)
44% of Tasmanian social media users are networking every day compared to a national average of only 30%. However, they average 160 ‘friends, contacts or followers’, which is well under the national average of 217.

Most social (businesses): ACT and Queensland
20% of Queensland and ACT businesses have a social media presence, which is way ahead of the national average of 15%.

Most friendly: Victoria
Victorian social media users have an average of 241 friends or followers each compared to 217 nationally.

Most brand friendly: Tasmania
Tasmania walloped the other states. 39% of Tasmanian social media users follow sites or groups associated with brands, compared to a national average of 20%.

Most bargain friendly: Queensland
16% of Queensland social media users have used group buying sites compared to a national average of 12%.

Most vocal: Tasmania
37% of Tasmanian social media users have written an online review or blog about their views on a product or service. This is way above second placed Northern Territory (28%) and eclipses the national average of 24%. Meanwhile, 67% of Tasmanian social media users have used online reviews or blogs to research product purchases. This is second only to Western Australia on 69%.

I’ve been thinking what might be behind these trends. Is Tassie’s very high uptake of the Internet (100%, as I mentioned before) driving all this social media activity? Or is there a sense of isolation that social media might be remedying? (Interestingly, social media take-up is also relatively strong in NT). Maybe it’s all of the above, but whatever it is, Tasmanians are the savvy social media users to watch!

The Sensis Social Media Report, which was released last week in conjunction with the Australian Interactive Media Indsutry Association, had some interesting things to say about social media trends among older Australians.

HELPING YOU STAY IN TOUCH

It’s no surprise that the uptake of social networks in Australia is heavily weighted to teens and young adults. According to the Sensis Social Media Report (which is available for free download from the Sensis corporate site), 93% of 14 – 29 year olds have used social media at some point compared to only 31% for over 65s.

While uptake maybe relatively low, the reasons why middle aged and senior Australians are using social media make for interesting reading.

Their reasons suggest that social media could have an enormous role to play in enriching the lives of older Australians in the years to come.

Consider this:

• 60% of over 50s use social media to share photos or videos. This is second only to 20 – 29 year olds and well above the 56% for all Australians.
• 18% of over 65s use social media to meet new friends – this proportion is exceeded only by 14 – 29 year olds.
• 14% of over 65s are using social media ‘to find people with the same interests that you have’. That’s bang on the average for all people and well ahead of 20 – 39 year olds and 50 – 64 year olds.

Growing old must be difficult for many Australians. You spend decades building a life, a family and a network of friends; only to find that they slowly ebb away due to an increasing loss of mobility.

I’ve seen this myself over the last few years. Before they made the trip to aged care, I watched my parents gradually become prisoners in their own home. Due to growing immobility, their ability to socialise – something the rest of us take for granted – became more and more difficult; to the point where they only rarely left the house and hardly ever saw their friends.

Social networks bring with them an enormous opportunity to alleviate the loneliness of advancing age. They offer a way to talk, share and even play with family and friends regardless of distance and mobility issues.

Which, in an ageing country like Australia, could become very important in the future.

HELPING YOU SHOP

Of course, many middle aged and senior Australians are as mobile as ever and living very active lives.

Which leads to another interesting observation about the use of social media in Australia.

You see, Australians over the age of fifty are showing a tendency to rely heavily on social media for purchase decisions.

• 17% of over 65s use social media to research holiday destinations or travel offers: the highest percentage for all age groups
• And 17% of 50 – 64 year olds, use social media ‘to research other products or services you might want to buy’. This response shared the top spot with 12 – 19 year olds.

There’s a simple message here. You wouldn’t normally think about over 50s as an audience for social media marketing.

But, given their spending power and propensity to use social media to research purchases, social media could be a significant opportunity for over 50s marketers in the years to come.

It’s easy to get carried away with the excitement surrounding “latest trends”, “new ideas” and “cutting edge” technology. We did it in the dot com boom when all we cared about was what the internet looked like and what it did. The thought of how the internet could make every day tasks easy caused our dial-up modems to run hot with excitement.

What we didn’t do was put a lot of thought into how to monetise it outside existing commercial models and we all know what happened after that.

But after attending the recent ad:tech 2010 conference at Sydney Convention Centre, I believe we are once again on the crest of an exciting new wave of technology and subsequently advertising opportunity.

At ad:tech 2010, it was discussed how connection speeds and mobility were bringing forward new ideas about how to reach and advertise online. And with Australian’s now spending up to one third of our leisure time online, consumers are waiting to be reached.

While online leisure time once meant time spent sitting in front of the computer, it now includes time spent sitting with your smartphone.

Collectively, Facebook users are spending seven hours a month on Facebook, 77 per cent of us read blogs and YouTube has more than 100 million unique visitors a month across the world and growing. In Australia in the past year we have seen Twitter account growth of 1050 per cent. The stats on Twitter usage are mind blowing with Twitter recently reporting that it was seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

Driving this growth in usage is mobile access. I know you’re all thinking “here’s another mobile blog post”. But with the launch rate and uptake of new mobile devices, the web is an anytime, anywhere proposition that’s no longer about sitting in the corner on your PC.

Did you know that 4.7 million mobile users around the world accessed Twitter from their mobile browser in January? This represents 347 per cent growth from the 1.05 million mobile users in January 2009. And in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser worldwide, up 112 per cent from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. Incredible!

As consumers, if we are spending all this time online, then that’s where we are going to be when businesses want to talk to us. And that folks, was the underlying focus of ad:tech 2010.

The key themes of the two day conference were how business can tap into the explosion in activity that is social media and how mobile usage has contributed to us spending even more of our time online. I know that there are social media deniers out there and they must be in the minority because any stream focused on social media was packed to the rafters. The main areas of social media focus were how business was using aspects of social media usage to drive its advertising reach.

Here is a quick take-away for those of you who didn’t make it to the social media streams at ad:tech 2010:

• Do “listen in” and “contribute” to the conversations occurring on various platforms. The key message was that as a business, you should be monitoring, reacting and responding.

• Don’t see social media as a short term strategy or fad. The clear message at ad:tech was that it needs to become an ongoing form of engagement. Marketers have had mixed fortunes when it comes to tapping into social media, they frequently try to engage with brand ambassadors and embrace user generated content. There were numerous examples of businesses that were able to gather a following through clever campaigns and events, but only to let them go as soon as the campaign was over.

• Remind yourself that you don’t have complete control. You can guide the followers, but once you overstep the mark and try to take control, you risk damaging your brand.

Without doubt advertising ideas and thinking relating to social media are in their infancy.

There have been numerous social media campaigns from mainstream advertisers who measure this success through video views, followers and friends.

The challenge moving forward is to turn these friends and followers into hard currency.

It is a task not dissimilar to a retailer attracting people into their store and then getting them to make a purchase.

The anomaly of Sydney Convention Centre as the venue for ad:tech 2010 was not lost on me. It was here in the early days of online that I attended many exhibitions promoting the internet. I’m pretty sure one of Sensis’ (then Pacific Access) key messages at those early PC shows was that it’s not all about “hits”, it’s about buyers. From that perspective nothing has changed.

It was interesting to observe the Digital Gurus panel conversation about the role that mobile advertising and social media will play in the foreseeable future at Monday’s Digital Marketing & Media Summit in Melbourne, and to compare this to what’s been said recently at similar forums in Sydney and published in marketing journals. It seems Melbourne’s marketing community is still treading with quite a bit of caution, perhaps waiting to see what others are going to do before going for broke and full integrating mobile and social media into their digital strategies…

A couple of the panellists observed that rightly or wrongly, mobile is still viewed as a bit of a ‘bolt-on’ to traditional marketing strategies. Sensis’ Cheryl Vize and a representative from Google agreed that we’re only just starting to see what mobile can achieve in terms of its ability to target consumers by personal profile and location. A major travel provider said they still a way off viewing mobile as a viable means for booking travel. This is interesting considering research such as the Sensis e-business Report based released in August revealed that 31% of male mobile users and 26% of female mobile users are accessing the internet on their mobiles and 41% use it to look for information on products and services and 25% have used it for banking. So it seems (and Google made this point) that mobile has a growing role to play where functionality and utility meet the consumer. Sure there’s a role for brand campaigns on mobile, but there’s also a massive opportunity to make services available via the most convenient and personal medium around. Perhaps major service providers just need convincing that device functionality can offer their consumers an optimal user experience…hopefully their digital agencies were listening!

On the social media front, key players in the travel and health insurance industry are realistic in their views that consumers don’t want to be their ‘friends’, but there’s a growing trend towards communities of people wanting to talk about travel and healthcare/insurance matters…so by monitoring this activity, and perhaps even setting up the infrastructure for discussion forums etc, brands can benefit by learning from their comments in order to better understand their consumers’ wants and needs.

What about smaller businesses wanting to reach their consumers via their channels? Cheryl said she sees Sensis’ role into the future as collaborating with them to help them understand how all of the different advertising channels, including emerging channels like social media and mobile, can help them and guide them through the maze of options.

As everyone kept coming back to over the course of the day, it’s not about jumping on the latest trend for the sake of it. Any marketing strategy needs to start with an understanding of who your consumers are and where they are looking.

The AIMIA Digital Summit in Sydney last week included presentations from the likes of BBC, Facebook, Viocorp and Microsoft, research presentations from the Internet Advertising Bureau, Nielsen Online and Research International and case studies from Aussie, Witchery Holdings and Tourism Queensland. To sum up some of the key themes that emerged over the two days… online usage is flattening out but continuing to grow and mobile internet usage is on the up. Companies like Aussie and Witchery Holdings now attribute a significant proportion of their revenue to online retailing.

But, 97% of Australian retail sales are still occurring offline. This highlights the importance of local search services like Yellow Pages, which provide the link between online purchase research and the bricks and mortar supplier.

Jonathon Stinton from Research International explained that with so many channels at the disposal of the consumer and the advertiser, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what the key influencers are over a purchase decision. He calls this the “Twilight Zone of information”. So what are influencers as far as we can tell? Consumers are strongly relying on the web to research retail buying decisions and social media is having a minor but growing impact on this phase of the purchase cycle. With the phenomenal rise in social media traffic, brands want a piece of the action and are exploring ways to tap into this and develop relationships with consumers.

So what should an advertising and media company take away from this? We need to be focused on providing choice to both buyers and sellers – and hence our multichannel strategy. With digital such a major part of many Australians’ search repertoire, Sensis needs to provide the most relevant online and mobile local search experiences possible to bring buyers and sellers together. Speaking on the closing panel, Sensis’ GM of Digital Development Cheryl Vize said this is why Sensis is so proud of innovations like the Yellow iPhone app and why we’re absolutely determined to keep “raising the digital bar”.

One thing seems clearer than ever: there may be no crystal ball, but it’s never been as important as it is now for a business to get the magnifying glass out and really examine the DNA of its target market and what media they are consuming where, when and for what purpose in order to determine how to get the best cut-through.

In his April speech “The Rise of Social Media“, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst commented on the US mobile takeaway business – Kogi BBQ – and their success in using Twitter to keep customers in touch with where their vans would be.Bruce commented that Kogi BBQ had acquired 15,000 Twitter followers in its short life.

Well, I happened across Kogi BBQ’s Twitter page the other day. Turns out their band of followers has more than doubled – to over 36,600 – in just three months.

Ahhh… the tweet smell of success.

As part two of his ‘The Age of Engagement’ series, Bruce Akhurst shares his thoughts on the rise of social media and what it could mean for marketers and the media.

Want to know about the US food van business that has built a huge following using Twitter? Or the toy company that used advice from its fans to create a truly innovative product development processes? Or the coffee chain that asked its customers for ideas and ended up with 70,000 of them in just one year?

Welcome to the extraordinary world of social media. The use of social networking sites have grown at extraordinary rates. Did you know that two thirds of Australian teenagers now use Facebook, YouTube or MySpace every month? (1)

But, in reality, these networks are just the beginning of the social media landscape.

In this presentation, Bruce takes a look at the world of social media and concludes that it is a game-changer on a par with the launch of television. It provides the potential for small businesses to access serious online technologies. And it can get companies and consumers not just talking with (instead of at) each other, but actually working together to build things that ultimately benefit them both.

(1) Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, base: Australians 14+