Derek Halpern joins us for Social Pros #12. Derek runs the show at Social Triggers – a blog all about using human psychology to drive online behavior.

For the stat of the week, we took a close look at some Q1 data from Facebook. The data comes from TBG Digital, a major seller and manager of Facebook advertising campaigns. The company based its findings on a sample of 327 billion ad impressions from 235 Facebook advertising clients:

• CPM rates are up 41%. The study cuts this data point – and most others – by geography. The US and the UK have seen the biggest rate increases over the past 3 months.
• CPC rates are up 23%. User growth is decelerating, but the site is becoming more attractive for advertisers – which creates supply/demand imbalance.
• Ad engagement is down. There are more ads on the page and – presumably – more first-time advertisers finding their way on Facebook.

I remember that rapid bid-up of Google Adwords that happened from 2003 to 2005…and I suppose never really stopped! So it isn’t a shock to see history repeat itself with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The question remains how quickly the bidding will accelerate – both in mainstream verticals and the local/longtail market.

Social Pros #11 goes live today, featuring the always enjoyable Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, Social Media Director at Hilton Worldwide.

The Social Media Stat of the Week comes courtesy of customer feedback management firm CFI Group, which conducts an annual Call Center Satisfaction Index.

The full-report is $500 and I’m a cheapskate, so we don’t have all of the details. But the press release headlines definitely warrant discussion:

• Shift to self-service: “In 2011, 27% of respondents had tried to resolve their issues elsewhere prior to resorting to working with the call center. The primary alternate channel was the web.”
• Post support experience socializaing: “What we are seeing is that, if you have a bad experience, you post it once on Facebook for all to see and then you’re done with it,” stated Terry Redding, director of development and delivery for CFI Group. “By the same token, we are seeing good experiences posted in the same way.”
• Volume drowns out the bad: “While a bad experience may increase the odds that someone will tell others, the sheer number of positive experiences and positive posts seems to be outweighing the negative word-of-mouth in volume.”

Somewhat related case-in-point: my Twitter audience has complained about every airline equally such that their complaints no longer register – let alone resonate. And the number of positive experiences – like in-flight wifi, first-class upgrades, etc. – nets out the complaints.

Social makes everything more transparent – the good and the bad. Should your community goal be to manufacture enough good to cover up the inevitable bad?

Social Pros #10 releases today, featuring Lauren Teague, Social Media & Fan Outreach Coordinator for the PGA Tour.

Fun Fact: Lauren made the connection between me and LoudMouth Golf, which resulted in my fantastic collection of Argyle pants. Listen to the episode for the full story…

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes from BRANDfog – a social strategy agency based in NYC. The agency recently released its 2012 CEO, Social Media, and Leadership Survey.

To me, these are the key nuggets:

• 86% of the people surveyed rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical.
• 81% of the people surveyed believe that CEOs who engage in social media are better equipped to successfully lead a company in a web 2.0 world.

Trust and transparency are the name of the game – stakeholders want it and social media provides the mechanism to make it happen.

The methodology is fairly loose:

The company surveyed several hundred employees of diverse companies, spanning in size from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and working at all levels of their respective organizations. Respondents representing a wide selection of industries, professions and regions were asked to answer questions pertaining to social media participation by their organization and executive leadership team.

…so I’m left to question who exactly is the CEO in the question. Depending on company size and industry, the role of the social media CEO could be quite diverse.

The document is pretty meaty and the visualizations are fantastic – so it is definitely worth reading in more detail.

Social Pros #9 drops today, featuring the very smart and very talented Christoper Penn, Director of Marketing at email marketing company WhatCounts and proprietor of Awaken Your Superhero blog.

Chris is the only person I know that can weave social media marketing, ninjutsu, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into the same conversation – so you know that this is a great episode.

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes from a February 2012 survey of B2B marketing and agency professionals by BtoB Magazine. You can read a summary of the report at eMarketer.com.

Here are some of nuggets from the report that we discussed in this week’s podcast:

• 59% of the survey participants view lead generation as their greatest online marketing challenge. B2B marketing is all about lead gen, so you gotta wonder what the other 41% of the marketers are worrying about. The summary report doesn’t list the other options – presumably they’re all leading indicators of the lead gen challenge?
• 57% said email marketing was the online channel that contributed the most qualified leads to their businesses. 13% said that social media was their biggest driver of leads, which was surprising to me – I would have guessed social .
• Only 5% of respondents described their social media efforts as “well-optimized,” compared with 30% who felt that way about their email programs – a reasonable number for social…and an appalling number for email considering it has been around for about 25 years now. Maybe only 30% of the market is capable of “well-optimizing” a channel? Or maybe only 30% care enough to do so?

Social Pros Episode #8 goes live today. In this episode, Jay and I host Ian Greenleigh, Manager, Content and Social Strategy at BazaarVoice.

The Social Media Stat of the Week isn’t a single number, but instead the swirling data points that collectively make up Facebook Insights.

Over the past few months, Facebook has introduced the “People Talking About This” and “Engaged Users” metrics – which the market is still struggling to understand – and deprecated meaningful metrics like the aggregate number of daily comments and likes made per page and per post.

And all of this happened around the same time that Facebook released massive changes to its advertising platform that organic and paid social programs. Over the coming months, social media marketers will find themselves accountable for ad budgets and will quickly need to understand how the numbers shake out to justify campaigns and spend.

It seems like Facebook is asking for more of your advertising budget and simultaneously complicating the process by which you’ll measure the performance of said budget.

Jay authored a great post about Facebook that interprets the tea leaves in such a way that indicates a new “engagement-centric” Facebook that’s less about outcomes and more about a “touchy, feely” ethos.

In short, the myriad Facebook Insights have never been more important…and they’ve never been more confusing.