Posts tagged social media
Everything marketers need to know about the social media landscape
Mar 12th
Are you tired of wondering what this ‘social media’ thing is all about?
Do you want to know how it can help you?
Well wonder no more! Created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, a new chart promises to guide you through the choppy and unsure waters of social networks and how to create social media strategy!
Yes that is reading like an infomercial on purpose – because frankly, there’s no excuse any more to avoid using social media.
The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, won Cannes’ Media Person of the Year this week, Twitter launched an ad platform and MySpace announced a major site overhaul. So there’s never been a better time to understand social media and how it can work for you (and your client).
The CMO’s guide to the social landscape, takes all the major social media sites in the US and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs.
For the full social media ‘cheat sheet’ click here
More businesses are finally turning to social media
Mar 2nd
Improving the digital effort for ‘business’ brands means turning to social media to hear directly from customers.
Businesses are increasingly using social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter in their online marketing strategies to market and advertise their products and services.
The 2009 Social Media Survey Report from Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia showed that 64% of companies surveyed had experimented with social media and 26% are heavily involved.
Just 10% of respondents were not using any type of social media at all, despite finding that social media can improve customer engagement – according to 73% of respondents.
Businesses are finally seeing the benefits arising from what is being dubbed as a ‘new-age’ approach.
Use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs are also being incorporated into more and more public relations strategies used by many small businesses to attract new customers.
Israr Sarwar, operations director at internet marketing agency Adrac, said: “The Adrac team realised the potential of social media in the early stages of the concept. Engaging with social target groups during business and product development can allow companies to robustly test and operate new technologies with a constant stream of ideas and feedback.
“Direct response and brand building campaigns have been successfully executed through the use of this subtle approach to advertising that doesn’t intimidate the user, but acts more as an introduction service.”
The popularity of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook means businesses have an easy way in to get there brands and products out there while engaging with customers and hopefully attracting new ones.
However, it’s not always an easy step for everyone to take so here are some tips from social media experts Mashable:
Step 1: Build a reputation of expertise
If a potential customer comes to your company’s website and sees an active blog with insightful posts on how your company’s product helps customers, reads detailed posts demonstrating your company’s knowledge, and comes across a few case studies, they’re going to be far more inclined to come to you for their needs. Social media provides an outlet for displaying who you and your company are. Talking about your industry in an intelligent way via Twitter and a regularly-updated blog can raise your company’s profile and brand it as a thought leader and expert in its specific business area.
Step 2: Research your customers
Everyone thinks of social media as a communication tool, but not enough people think of it as a research tool. With the ridiculous amount of data produced every day on social networks, blogs, and in conversations, it should be apparent that you can learn tidbits or spot major trends by tracking the social universe. Know what your customers are saying and track industry trends.
Step 3: Ramp up your networking
If you are competing with another company to land a big deal, it always helps to have connections and friendships within the company you’re trying to woo. You should always be networking, because you never know when a contact can become your advocate or even the decision-maker. And that’s where social media can help. There are a lot of things you can do to get started on the networking front. They key, though, is that you have to reach out.
Step 4: Learn from others
In the end, you want to come out sharper, more knowledgeable, and better prepared than your competitors. It doesn’t matter if you have 60 or 600,000 customers, and it does not matter whether or not you sell to general consumers or Fortune 500 companies. Almost everyone is using or tracking social media and it provides you a prime opportunity to make you and your business a leader rather than a follower.
- Seek out blogs and publications in your industry and subscribe via RSS
- Network with relevant experts, including those who may only be partially related
- Follow the insights of business leaders on Twitter
- Connect with those who comment on your own blog
- Make yourself very easy to find on the web – if people search for your name or your business, you should be at the top of Google’s results. Building a blog, using a Twitter, and creating a decent corporate website always helps
- Keep an open mind.
How to target men using fashionable technology
Feb 23rd
What’s the best way to market the latest technology? Make it look fashionable of course.
The excitement of Apple’s new iPad set many hearts a-flutter. Financially, it is predicted to be another Apple money spinner.
Industry analysts Gartner Research expect the iPad to inject rocket fuel into the sleepy tablet PC market once it actually goes on sale at the end of March, boosting tablet sales from 1 to 9 million by the end of the year.
But how many so-called gadget fans are really in it for the technology? Are some more concerned with image over function, perhaps ageing Baby Boomers wanting trendy gadgets to stave off looking middle aged?
A survey of over 500 users by global news website OneNewsPage asked if some gadgets such as iPhones and Playstations look inappropriate in the hands of older consumers.
It’s worth noting that most who took part in OneNewsPage’s survey were strongly into their technology.
Forty four per cent of respondents claimed they ‘always’ buy the latest gadgets as soon as they go on sale.
But it was a close contest on the question of age. Fifty two per cent agreed that keeping up with latest gadgets is a sign of desperation, while 48% disagreed.
Over half (55%) felt gadgets were like clothes, and consumers needed to buy the right ones for their age.
Indeed, 63% felt that once a person turns 40, no gadget is ever going to make them look ‘cool’.
The survey found that 44% agreed with the statement that people over 40 on a Playstation was “plain wrong”. And 40% felt similarly about the over 40s using iPhones.
Meanwhile, research from Microsoft Advertising has laid bare the depth of British men’s love affair with technology.
The report, entitled ‘PFM Unplugged’, reveals that the UK’s Pre-Family Men (PFM) – young males who have completed their education but not yet started a family – are heavily engaged in technology and always online.
PFM are interacting with technology in some way during every waking hour (anyone who has a boyfriend knows that). They are the first generation to have grown up with the internet, and with the majority (99%) claiming to go online either every day or nearly every day and half using their mobile phones to do so.
The research shows that they are increasingly reliant on the Internet for entertainment, information and communication, with 80% going so far as to state that they would be lost without it.
In fact, the internet is the technology 57% of PFM are most attached to, closely followed by mobile phones (49%) and TV (46%).
PFM are apparently never ‘doing nothing’, and even downtime is filled by some activity, more often than not facilitated by technology. It’s also often also the first thing they think about when they wake up with a quarter of PFM admitting to checking their email and 18% looking at social networking sites on their mobile phone before they get out of bed in the morning.
Despite the popularity of social networks and the perception that traditional social email is dying, email remains the most valued online tool amongst PFM, with 52% of respondents rating it above all others (compared with 25% for search and 12% for social networking sites) and 87% stating their use of email had stayed the same or increased over the last year. 94% use email at least once per day, compared with 60% that go on to a social network.
Technology is fuelling the blurring of work and play as modes of behaviour overlap. While 43% of the men surveyed admitted occasionally browsing the internet during afternoons at work, PFM is also checking his work email in the evenings, on his way to and from work and before he gets out of bed in the morning.
Online video content is an important source of entertainment for PFM and it’s no longer just limited to short clips- 73% of PFMs will watch video-on-demand (VOD) at least once a week with nearly half watching full length TV programs. Catching up on TV shows they’ve missed and watching archive shows were the main drivers to viewing online and the majority (59%) viewed on a laptop.
The ‘PFM Unplugged’ report from Microsoft Advertising also provides advertisers with a series of recommendations on how they may reach and engage with PFM based on the insights uncovered in the research. You can download it here.
Can PRs do SEO?
Feb 17th
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and social media strategist at Onlinefire, says that SEO is becoming more and more important to PRs.
SEO PR or ‘Search Engine Optimisation Public Relations’ is a term which has been banded around for a number of years, but it is only recently that the PR industry has adopted the practice in earnest.
This is mainly because there’s been a lot of controversy over who should own SEO, but fundamentally, SEO and PR go hand in hand. They work together to dramatically enhance a brand’s online presence and positively influence search.
Specifically, the aim of SEO PR is to increase brand visibility and conversation when consumers search for your products or services. After all, the first few pages of Google should return only the most relevant and positive news, reviews and commentary. You want your brand to be at the top of that list.
Link building is another important area where SEO and PR work together. Incoming quality links are a vital part of success on Google, and the value of these links to a company website cannot be underestimated.
Brands have relationships with a plethora of organisations, and PRs spend much of their time helping to promote and nurture these relationships. To successfully build your brand position on Google, it is essential to encourage relevant and high-ranking sites to link to you. This is where SEO PR again plays a pivotal role.
Whatever you believe about the debate - PR and SEO are working towards the same end goal; to achieve positive brand exposure to future potential customers.
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and digital PR specialist with wide ranging client experience; from technology to travel and sports to drinks, in both business-to-business and consumer sectors. A social media strategist at Onlinefire, Charley has worked across online PR campaigns for Virgin Media, Panasonic and the Post Office.
Google – Buzz or Boredom?
Feb 15th
From Bruce Townsend, Actinic
Google seem to have created a bit of a buzz lately with a product called… well, Buzz. But is it any good, and should marketers pay it any attention?
Google Buzz is essentially a feed reader, and a pretty basic one at that; in fact it seems to be derived from Google Reader, which has been around for a few years now.
With Buzz, though, Google have done some clever things. They’ve included support for media; given it a particular focus on social networking sites; and made it easy to add feeds from the main ones. They’ve also integrated it with Google Mail. So now you can check your emails and view posts from all the people you are following, all in one place – including picture feeds from Flickr and Picasa, and video from YouTube.
They’ve also branded and marketed it quite neatly. Coupled with its profile within Google Mail, this has grabbed a lot of attention and made it the talked-about application of the moment.
Being a feed reader, information does only flow in one direction. Comments posted only appear in Buzz, not in the application the original message came from. This may prove to be a weakness, and makes it vastly inferior to Flock, which has never gained much of a following. On the other hand, Buzz has the benefit of Google’s massive weight behind it.
To really gain traction, Buzz may have to actually wean people away from services like Twitter, and it may be too late in the day for that. Initially it will probably be used mainly for person to person interaction, particularly Google Mail users. But it could become a useful tool for businesses wanting to monitor what customers are saying. And with Google behind it, who knows how far it will go?
It’s certainly one to watch.
Google is determined to make the web social, but will advertisers benefit?
Feb 10th
Google has launched yet another social feature to its brand – Google Buzz. The search giant is determined to make the web social, but how will it benefit its search business?
Many of the headlines around today announcing Google Buzz focus on ‘Google taking on Facebook’, even ours does on the UTalkMarketing homepage. And while the search engine might look to be competing with Facebook, it is in fact just taking a lead from the pioneering social media site.
As I explained last week on Facebook’s sixth birthday, Facebook isn’t so phenomenal and newsworthy just because it has more than 350 million global users; it is credited with creating what we now know popularly as social media.
It has also forced other digital media companies to change. Just a couple of years ago Google was the king of the internet which had a seemingly endless reign. Now it is being challenged in every corner including new competition from Microsoft and Yahoo! in the form of Bing.
Google said on its official blog: “We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience.”
That’s right, sharing is caring. And with this new feature Google is making sure that users share on Google – links from Google search, video’s from Google’s YouTube, photos from Google’s image search.
It’s locking its users down and making damn sure they stay on Google. An interesting way to beat off competition…and not just the competition from Facebook!
Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. It already has the potential to reach more than 150 million monthly users (its existing Gmail user base).
It’s all good news for Google’s search revenues as advertisers will be fighting even harder to get to the top of those search results if it means they may feature in someone’s inbox too!
Remember, Google is everywhere.
Why your digital strategy is all about the ‘fans’
Feb 9th
Brands are increasingly migrating to Facebook, setting up Fan pages and getting rid of their own branded websites. But can social media replace a corporate presence on the web?
As you are probably well aware of by now, Facebook as yet again rolled out a new home page design. The site is still looking to make money you see, and to do that it needs to make the look and feel more attractive and navigation easier for users, including brands who have their own ‘Fan’ pages and profiles.
Everyone from Toyota to McDonalds, to Coca-Cola to UTalkMarketing has a Facebook ‘Fan’ page. And with the popularity and users’ willingness to become Fans, will Facebook Fan pages make branded websites redundant?
Coke is just one global brand that is shifting its digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010, according to newmediaage. Kelloggs has also made a similar move and will host digital activity on social media platforms including Facebook.
The benefits of Facebook are simple: it’s where your customers are spending the majority of their online time (some 350 million global customers, that is).
Facebook Fan pages also allow you and your customers to communicate in real time. Fans can also communicate with each other allowing you to listen in to the conversation and monitor what is being said about you.
Also, you’re only a mouse click away and don’t need to build a time consuming and expensive SEO and site awareness campaign to attract visitors
Moreover, creating a Fan Page is free, quick and easy. People actively engage on Facebook commenting, uploading photos and sharing interesting links, helping them to feel like part of the campaign. Awareness also spreads virally when people joining Fan Pages appears in the news feed.
So how do you build a successful Fan page on Facebook?
1. Network with other platforms
2. Creating a resource
3. Creating contests that include participation
4. Empowering pre-existing pages
5. Targeting the proper demographic
Creating a Facebook fan page is simple, but it will also take time to build up a community of followers. Build good content, make it easy to share, and let people know about it, and over-time maybe you too could phase out your corporate site.
The influential Web Celebs marketers need to be targeting
Feb 5th
Back in 1968 Andy Warhol predicted, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Today the technology to achieve global fame exists with the internet revolutionising business, media, marketing and communications practices
But who from the influential ‘Who’s Who of Web Celebs’ should marketers and PRs be aiming to influence themselves?
Forbes’ ‘Web Celeb 25’ aims to provide the answer. The annual poll champions “the people who have turned their passions into new media empires,” people whose fame grew out of, and is dependent on, the internet, from stay-at home-mums to geek entrepreneurs.
Each candidate in a list of over 200 Internet personalities was ranked in four areas: Web references as calculated by Google, traffic ranking of their home page as calculated by Alexa, TV/radio mentions and press clips compiled from Factiva, and number of followers on microblogging site Twitter. These four categories were totaled and weighted to produce a final score, then sorted to produce our rankings.
For the third year in a row, controversial gossip blogger Perez Hilton has been crowned king. His site attracts more than 7.2 million people a month, putting it among the 500 most-visited sites on the Internet, and Hilton has more than 1.77 million followers on Twitter.
The No. 2 Web Celeb, Michael Arrington, is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, as editor of TechCrunch.
“A mere mention of a company on its pages can make or break a startup,” say Forbes.
But perhaps the most interesting entry is Pete Cashmore, in at No. 3. Cashmore came up with the idea for what has become one of the world’s most influential websites, not in Silicon Valley, but at his parent’s house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Oh, and it was when he was a teenager too.
Today Mashable has more than 10 million unique monthly users reading its ‘outsider prespective’ on the web, while 24-year-old Cashmore has almost 2 million Twitter fans.
LA, NYC, London… Aberdeenshire. As Thomas L. Friedman claimed, “the world is flat.” We’re all now playing on a democratised playing field thanks to the net.
In the latest ‘Web Celeb 25’ edition eight faces appear for the first time. The highest-ranking new members are Evan Williams and Isaac ‘Biz’ Stone, cofounders of Twitter. The pair have more than 2.8 million Twitter followers between them, closely watched by legions of fans.
The youngest Web Celeb coming in at No. 25, is Shane Dawson, 21, who posts short comedy videos to his YouTube channel which has over 1.2 million subscribers. His videos have been watched more than 204 million times.
The Forbes ‘Web Celeb 25′
1. Perez Hilton – perezhilton.com
2. Michael Arrington – EditorTechCrunch.com
3. Pete Cashmore – Founder Mashable.com
4. Evan Williams & Biz Stone – Twitter
5. Kevin Rose – Founder Digg.com
6. Guy Kawasaki – GuyKawasaki.com
7. Heather “Dooce” Armstrong – blogging Mum at Dooce.com
8. Tila “Tequila” Nguyen – model/singer blogger at Tilashotsspot.buzznet.com
9. Gary Vaynerchuk – win expert blogger at GaryVaynerchuk.com
10. Cory Doctorow – author CrapHopund.com
11. Om Malik
12. Leo Laporte
13. Frank Warren
14. Robert Scoble
15. Chris Brogan
16. Wil Wheaton
17. Matt Drudge
18. Danny Sullivan
19. Jeff Jarvis
20. John C. Dvorak
21. Ana Marie Cox
22. Ree Drummond
23. Jason Calacanis
24. Seth Godin
25. Shane Dawson
Happy 6th birthday Facebook – what did we ever do without you?
Feb 5th
Today marks the sixth birthday of Facebook. Although the site was not the first entrant into the social media space, it certainly put the medium on the marketing map.
In all honesty, I can hardly remember the days before Facebook. What were they like…it seems as if it must have been the dark ages. And I’m not even ad avid user of the site, but every now and then, it is good for something.
Not only did Facebook liberate us and bring the world closer together (so Facebook believes, anyway), it brought about an entirely new platform for marketers and advertisers, essentially changing the digital landscape forever.
It has, as I have said before, fundamentally changed the relationship between brands and consumers and of course, they way that consumers talk to each other. It has allowed marketers to test human behaviour, to listen in on the conversation and sometimes, manipulate us into promoting them for free (this, by the way, isn’t a bad thing).
With over 350 million users worldwide, Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest web property in the world (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively).
Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally.
In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before, making it the most visited website on Christmas Day.
In December alone, Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.
For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million unique users. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public.
So how can marketers captialise on these numbers?
Stephen Haines, Commercial Director at Facebook UK, recently wrote a brilliant piece on UTalkMarketing about how brands can create and update a Page’s on Facebook. He says that Facebook ads allow people to engage with ads in the same way they interact with other content on the site without leaving the page they’re viewing. For example, potential customers can directly engage with your business by clicking on the “Become a Fan” link or the “RSVP to this Event” link. In addition, this action automatically creates a story on the person’s profile page and possibly in their friends’ home page “Highlights”—generating free distribution for you. You can read more here.
And if you’re more interested in learning how to use Facebook for market research, Ray Poynter, a director at Virtual Surveys, explains that marketers can use Facebook Polling.
He told UTalkMakreting that to find out quick answers to simple questions, you can simply log in, type a simple question, specify a geographic location and a sample size, pays as little as 51 US dollars (for 100 interviews) and the results start flowing in.
These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong. You can read more here.
So if you’ve not delved into the world of Facebook, now you have no excuse. Facebook is trialed and tested – and it really does work in terms of getting in the faces of consumers. It’s true, I Facebooked it.
Why do most social networking campaigns fail? Marketers can’t track ROI
Feb 3rd
Enterprise use of social networking data to improve productivity a long way off, according to Gartner.
Just 25 per cent of advertisers will use social networking data to improve performance and productivity by 2015, according to analyst firm Gartner. But social media has been around for some time now with marketers continualy experimenting with the medium. So why have they failed to make use of the information they are acquiring with such campaigns?
Most businesses are still a long way from using social networks to analyse the information gathered through a campaign.
Users resent knowing that automated tools analyse their behaviour, according to Gartner, which recommends that companies secure the buy-in of the people they hope to include in the analysis.
Furthermore, social networking and email capabilities could soon merge into a single service.
“Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” said Gartner analyst Matt Cain.
This could be another way to track information, but Gartner says its a few years off yet.
The biggest dilemma for social media marketers is tracking ROI.
In the absence of any accepted metrics, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is tempting sales making an impact.
Here are a few ways to consider measuring social media ROI:
First, determine what you want to measure, whether it’s corporate reputation, conversations or customer relationships. These objectives require a more qualitative measurement approach, so start by asking some questions. For example, if the objective is measure ROI for conversations, create a benchmark:
- Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?
- How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?
Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:
- Build better relationships with our key audiences?
- Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?
- Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?
There are companies that offer services to assist with this kind of measurement, which requires a great deal of human analysis on top of the automated results to appropriately assess the tonality and brand positioning across various social media platforms.
If the goal is to measure traffic, sales or SEO ranking, we can take a more quantitative approach. There are some free tools that can help with this type of measurement, including:
- AideRSS allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites (Google (Google), Digg (Digg), Del.icio.us).
- Google Analytics (Google Analytics) and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.
- Xinu is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.
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