The Engaged Consumer

In an earlier podcast I did regarding Facebook Connect, I talked about the fact that I think that this is the future of social marketing. I am so excited about it, I enlisted the help of our PR firm, SHIFT Communications, to collect three more big brains including Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, digital editor of AdWeek, Brian Morrissey and marketing blogger/consultant, Susan Getgood.

A few highlights from the session for those that like to read more than they like to listen:

• Jeremiah Owyang (3:49 – 3:58) “In the past, we thought of interactive marketing which is user to Web site. Now, in social marketing, very different, it’s user to user. “
• Brian Morrissey (5:18 – 5:43) “What we’re talking about here with Connect, is how brands can look at these social platforms and tool sets as ways to really further make connections with their consumers wherever they are.  And Facebook Connect has the possibility of allowing them to embed social marketing into how they interact with consumers.”
• Susan Getgood (10:08 – 10:34) “Knowing what people find interesting to share is as important as knowing what they are looking at themselves.  When we have a Web site, we can look at analytics and see which pages people are hitting and where they click-through and all this other stuff, but the idea that they thought something was important enough to share, that kind of information gives a company of any size the kind of information to know what kind of content really engages your customer and you can build more of it.”

During the podcast, I also referred to some engaging statistics put together by the Business Insider regarding the effectiveness of Facebook Connect (thanks to Pearl Russell on the Powered team for finding these):

• Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
• Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
• Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site.  Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Most importantly, you probably want to know the answer to which successful companies are currently using Facebook Connect? Unfortunately, there aren’t many Fortune 500 companies using it yet but during our podcast, Brian brought up the examples of  JC Penney (it’s number 4 on the list of 10 in a great post by Mashable) and Red Bull. Jeremiah mentioned Volkswagon’s Meet the VW’s campaign.

To download this podcast, right-mouse click here and select “save file as.”

If you’re interested, we’ve got a slick demo of how Facebook will work with some of our Powered clients.

NOTE: The “Back to School” podcast series will be a regularly occurring podcast focused on the business value of social marketing, social media and online communities. Guests will include practitioners, authors, analysts and thought leaders in the space.