and the winners are…

Macy’s,

Merry Christmas

and

Santa Claus!

- Happy Holidays!

The social media phenomena 2010 – an overview

With only a few days till Christmas it is time to wrap up the social media year.  The major common denominator is huge growth supported by impressive figures, such as Facebook sales ($2bn up 150% from 2009 and value >$40bn), and users in LinkedIn, Twitter. The mobile location-based solutions such as Foursquare, Facebook places, Gowalla and others, have introduced a whole new social media element and increased the variety of channels thus even lowered the barrier to enter to social media.  Indeed, they managed to construct a bridge between physical and virtual presences by providing versatile user-friendly and game alike applications that take place in real physical environment.

Further big phenomena have been social shopping (group-shopping) like Groupon and the breakthrough of tablets, especially the iPad with a constantly growing number of applications. All these have resulted in a growing amount of companies adopting social media to their digital tools portfolio and a clear boom in social media advertising.

For 2011 we anticipate even stronger role for the content and a more disciplined approach for social media supported by strategy, policies, and advanced analytics. And naturally, there will be news and new applications galore probably addressing various types of crowd-sourcing and shopping, and of course mergers and acquisitions.

Some brands and their social media Christmas presence

For the end of 2010 we took a brief look at some brands’ Christmas campaigns and presence in social media. Amazing but the presence was not very impressive.

K-Mart’s  “Share Your Christmas Story” and Macy’s “Believe” were in our opinion the best ones. K-Mart has created its own Christmas Community with people sharing experiences, traditions, and photos. The participants can win gift cards. There is also a facebook application with the same name but we are not sure if it really is from K-Mart. We think that K-mart has a good tactic to engage but we found it esthetically fairly modest. Also operationally, the image link in one corner of the homepage only might indicate that the company does not yet really trust too much on social media. Otherwise the company page is very Christmas flavored and nice.

Macy’s “Believe” is a charity program with a Christmas wish list application with several social features such as a celebrity wish list.  Macy’s will donate to make-a-wish foundation $1 per each delivered letter up to $1 million. We really like the visual realization of the app as well as the way how it is optimized and linked with www.macys.com.  Total, “Believe” is a great combination of commercial initiative and social media and the best Christmas campaign we could find.

EBay has added a “Holiday” tab to its Facebook site which takes the visitor to a quite nice-looking page that is linked to www.ebay.com. The links to opposite direction are either totally missing or at least not well visible. Dell is one of the most successful brands in social media but it does not show any Holiday theme at all in Facebook which we find odd. Frankly, the large e-commerce retailers do not seem to celebrate Christmas with impressive social media campaigns.

The comparison of large European department stores with the US counterparts demonstrates the market maturity: From the group of eminent players such as Harrods, Galeries Lafayette, Kaufhof, KaDeWe, La Rinascente, and El Corte Ingles virtually none is running any significant Christmas campaigns in social media.

Santa Claus and other Christmas keywords

Last but not least we checked out how Santa Claus is doing in social media. Although there is only one real Santa Claus, there seems to be quite an amount of Santa Claus profiles in Facebook.  Of course there is only one twitter account for @Santaclaus with full 429 followers anda total of 3 tweets… Overall, the Santa is not doing well at all in social. We also found a deeper research on Santa’s social media strategy or rather the lack of it. We kindly recommend Santa to outsource social media for 2011 since that’s where his vast audience is.

Finally, we compared the tweets of some frequent Christmas keywords: Merry Christmas and Santa Claus in 3 languages: English, Spanish, and German. The statistics are provided by twitwinner. Please see the results below. Happy Holidays and Felizes Fiestas!