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Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Why You Need a Social Media Hub

September 5th, 2010 by Judge

According to Samir Balwani; Why You Need a Social Media Hub

The social media hub centralizes a brand’s digital communications, connecting social media profiles with the business website. As more social media platforms begin to emerge, the need for a central branded social media hub grows.

Bring People to Your Branded Site

Many brands use their individual social media profiles as their central communications hubs. For example, some businesses focus their attention on Facebook and continue to direct their consumers there. Instead of capturing the community on their own brand site, the business is losing potential consumers to Facebook.

Although a Facebook fan is important, it’s more important to immerse the consumer in your brand. Instead of driving visitors to your social media profiles, use the Facebook and Twitter API to allow users to connect with you online without leaving your site.

Make Multiple Connections

Most marketers look at profiles individually when planning their social media presence. Consumers have multiple profiles; a Twitter account and Facebook profile. Why not connect with a consumer on each profile and create multiple connections?

The social media hub creates an area where consumers can flow from one social media profile to another. Make it easy to grow your network and control how consumers navigation across your profiles.

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Leverage Different Platforms for Different Things

When building a social media strategy, go beyond the simple idea of creating a community and instead think about actions. What do you want consumers to do on each social media site?

Use the social media hub to outline the action you want consumers to take on each social media profile. Consider it a “call to action“. Explicitly define what they should do (take the quiz, fan us, leave a comment).

Build a Central Distribution Platform

The social media hub ties together a digital presence that would otherwise be fragmented and broken. The hub helps a brand create a cohesive strategy that integrates each social media profile.

Brands with popular hubs are able to tap into the community to help spread published content. Hubs are extremely effective when distributing information, delivering branded media, and new media public relations.

Control and Brand Your Most Valuable Social Platform

BMW has more than 1 million fans on Facebook. That’s 1 million people they convinced to perform an action and subscribe to their page. What if Facebook decided to charge for fan pages? Would BMW walk away? What if they had planned ahead and captured this community on their own site instead?

Your social media hub, your website, is the most valuable social media profile you have. It is the only one that allows you to directly control and own your content. With a branded social media hub, you’re in charge and not at the behest of another company.

Don’t let Facebook own your whole community. Use the tools of sharing they afford, but be sure to be building that community on your site with email newsletters, rss feeds, and a robust networking system.

Collect Consumer Insights

Finally, nothing beats the data collected by a site you fully own. Want to know how many people visited your site? Where they came from? How long they stayed? What they did? It’s all information you can get from Google Analytics or almost any other analytics package once added to your social media hub.

Facebook offers some data but it leaves a lot to ask for. Twitter and most other social media platforms offer nothing.

Analyzing data allows you to better understand your community and optimize your social media strategies. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to collect huge amounts of data by ignoring your brand hub’s analytics.

Where’s Your Hub?

A social media hub is a powerful aspect of an online marketing strategy. In my mind it’s a necessity. Without it, you lose control of your community, create a disoriented digital presence, fragment your content distribution, and lose out on a great deal of data.

Do you have a social media hub? What brand has created a good central hub? How are you connecting your sites? How are you using your social media hub?


  

A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights

September 3rd, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights

Facebook ImageEkaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.

You have created a Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time.

Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.

Examine a Wide Range of Data

There are two types of Facebook insights:

The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.

Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.

Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

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Social Media – Target to Sell Facebook Credits as Gift Cards in Stores

September 1st, 2010 by Ernie

According to Mashable; Target to Sell Facebook Credits as Gift Cards in Stores

Target will be the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits in its stores come Sunday. The Facebook Credits gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at all 1,750 Target locations and at Target.com.

The cards will soon make their way to two or three additional national retailers, according to USA Today.

Facebook Credits is a virtual currency redeemable for primarily in-game Facebook purchases. In Farmville, for instance, gamers can use Facebook Credits as a currency, in lieu of credit cards, to purchase additional items for their farms. 7-11 also sells gift cards specifically for FarmVille.

Facebook Credits gift cards package the virtual currency in consumer-friendly entities, which Facebook hopes will appeal to holiday shoppers. The gift cards are visually no different than the variety sold in stores today, and were produced by GMG Entertainment, the same company that makes Apple’s iTunes cards.

Social gaming is a relatively new industry with huge potential. More than 56 million Americans are now playing social games. By 2013, annual sales from virtual goods are expected to reach $6 billion. Facebook’s foray into brick-and-mortar retail stores is a significant move that will help the company capitalize on social gaming.

Facebook (Facebook) also has a deal in place with MOL, an online micropayment company, to sell Facebook Credits at retail stores in Asia and Australia (Australia).

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2010 Study Shows Marketers Plan to Spend More on Social Media Programs

August 31st, 2010 by Ernie

According to a Pivot Study; Shows Marketers Plan to Spend More on Social Media Programs

More Than 87% Will Increase Investment in the Next 12 Months

NEW YORK, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — The Pivot Conference today released findings from its survey of 137 brand marketers and ad agency professionals that point to a significant investment in social media marketing programs in the next 12 months. Of the marketers surveyed, about two-thirds (63%) have already implemented social media marketing programs, and 87% plan to increase that investment in the next 12 months. Of the 37% of marketers that are not currently investing in social media, 62% plan to invest within one year.

Based on measurement, analysis and goals for their programs, 89% of those surveyed said their social media marketing programs have been successful, and of that, 30% cited that programs were very successful, e.g. generated more sales or improved customer relations. On the other hand, 11% of the marketers surveyed said they were unable to tell whether their programs were successful.

“While the technology and tools are there, social media is still uncharted territory for many marketers,” says Chris Shipley, executive producer of Pivot Conference. “The survey results indicate that they are planning to spend money but are still looking for guidance on how to spend their budgets, how to track ROI and the best ways to engage with key customers.”

Social Media Marketing Is a Small Portion of Total Budget But Spending Is Likely to Increase

Despite the relatively low cost to implement social media programs, 74% of marketers surveyed said that less than 20% of their online marketing resources, including budget and staff to manage them, were devoted to social media programs. And yet, 87% stated plans to increase their investment in social media marketing programs in the next 12 months.

Who Is the Target Customer?

75% of the marketers surveyed are targeting the “always-on” consumer, described as “hyper-connected” because of their frequency of engagement with the Internet and mobile devices.

When asked their opinions about “always-on,” 18-34 year old consumers, the majority of surveyed marketers agreed:

The study indicated that just over half of the marketers surveyed (57%) are seeking active engagement with customers using social media platforms.  Another 30% are exploring customer involvement with caution or have not yet formalized how to engage with those customers using social media.

Where Customers Go, Marketers Follow

In keeping with the online habits of 18-34 year old consumers, the most popular Internet/mobile platforms that marketers are currently using include:

Emerging platforms in which marketers are planning to increase investment include:

Methodology

The online survey was conducted by Extra Mile Audience Research on behalf of the Pivot Conference between June 29 and July 30, 2010. The invitation to participate in this online survey was sent to corporate marketers and ad agency professionals via email and through social media channels. 137 responded to the survey.

To request a copy of the report, please visit: https://pivotcon.wufoo.com/forms/pivot-survey-request-form/

About the Pivot Conference

The Pivot Conference, taking place October 17 – 20 in New York, is a new kind of marketing conference singularly focused on the 18-34 year old demographic: their attitudes, technologies and preferences. Pivot is the first and only conference where brand marketers can go to gain essential confidence in their power to inhabit the culture, conventions and conversations of today’s young consumers. Sponsors of Pivot Conference include Automattic, Geeknet, Glam Media, Ooyala, VideoEgg, Yahoo!.

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How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future

August 30th, 2010 by Judge

According To Mashable; How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future

Today’s CEO is not social. So says Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony. Very few of the CEOs at top companies in the U.S. and the rest of the world have any material presence on the popular social media sites. Colony believes they should be social though, and all signs are pointing to a future filed with CEOs who can speak the language of the people — social media.

While one can only speculate about the future of CEOs and social media, there’s no question that social media plays a huge part in life and the world as we know it right now.

As younger CEOs replace older ones, news consumption habits change and social media continues its trend towards ubiquity, there’s little question that the man (or woman) at the top will need a firm grasp on social media — whether that be for recruiting, scouting, public engagement or social CRM.

The Next Generation of CEOs

When it comes to CEOs, there’s a vast disparity between the young ones heading up startups and the more seasoned CEOs running the world’s most powerful companies. That disparity is social media — the young are more versed than the old. The difference between the two groups can be attributed to different generations and different attitudes around content and information meant for the public and private domains.

No one is predicting that the venerable CEOs will be booted from their lofty perches for lack of a Twitter account. In fact, younger CEOs with a predilection and savvy for social media may find their visibility to either be a contributing factor to their rise or a liability once they graduate to bigger, hence more vulnerable, publicly traded companies.

Let’s have a gander at some stats on the status quo. In April, Colony let it be known that most CEOs are not social. In fact, by his own research and calculations, Colony has concluded that, “None of the CEOs of Fortune Magazine’s top 100 global corporations have a social profile.”

Social media abstinence even appears to extend to CEOs of tech companies. “Eric Schmidt of Google is an infrequent Twitterer and is not a blogger; Steve Ballmer at Microsoft has no blog and no Twitter account; Michael Dell is on Twitter but is not an external blogger … Steve Jobs of Apple, and Larry Ellison of Oracle have no Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or blog presences that we could find.”

His findings paint a bleak present tense. In the coming years, however, there will be a changing of the guard that favors social media over silence.

We Live in a Social Media World

Let us pause and reflect on the fact online users spend 22.7% of their time on social networking sites. That’s twice as much time as we spend on any other online activity. Consider where people are getting their news today. More and more, it’s not through direct sources like USA Today, The New York Times, or TV broadcasts, but through social networks.

Plus, industry is social. In the future, every company, no matter how small or how big, will be influenced and impacted by social media internally or externally. In the entertainment industry, for instance, social media has the potential to significantly bump up live television viewing audiences. Network executives such as Greg Goldman, formerly an executive director at ABC and now CCO at Philo, are nearly certain it’s happening now and will become more obvious with time.

Take what you know about the world today and then ask yourself, can a CEO remain relevant if they’re not versed in the new language of the people they serve?

SCVNGR’s youthful CEO Seth Priebatsch doesn’t believe so. The 21-year-old CEO says he’s “never lived in a world where I didn’t use social media.”

Priebatsch compares social media to cloud computing, and makes the analogy of how building applications for the cloud is a given. “It never occurred to me that you would write software to run on machines as opposed to access it through a browser. Why would you do that?”

For Priebatsch, social media is a given.

“Those companies that actively monitor, react and engage with what people are saying about them are at a huge advantage. If I’ve just launched a new feature on SCVNGR and people like it (or don’t) I know immediately. And that’s powerful. And what’s even cooler is that I can dig deeper. Someone says on Twitter: ‘Hey @SCVNGR, love the new social check-in. Way cool!’ and I can tweet back immediately ‘Thanks @user. What have you been using it for?’ And immediately get more information on how people are using SCVNGR, why they like it (or don’t) and how to make it better. That’s real power. It combines huge scale (tons of people talking) with massive granularity (ability to dig deep into one response).”

CEOs and the Future

The business leaders of tomorrow will be versed in social media, and we don’t need a crystal ball to predict how CEOs in the future will use social media. It’s the socially versed CEOs of today who help manufacture the following:

Opportunity Knocks

LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman, himself a social media advocate and user, believes that perceptions around social media being too risky for CEOs are beginning to change.

“I would predict that more and more executives will see this as an opportunity rather than a risk,” he says.

Certainly the opportunity is there. Ulman pulls from his own work at LIVESTRONG as proof of concept. “Transparency and authenticity are two important factors in our work and social media allows us to amplify both in a significant way.”

Plus, given the digital landscape of the world we live in, future CEOs using social media is practically a given.

“Those who are currently growing up using these tools and mediums will have them integrated closely with their daily lives as they begin to enter the workforce, so they will come to expect their colleagues to be engaged as well,” according to Ulman.

Colony also sees social media as a platform paved with opportunity. He believes that CEOs should be social if the CEO “has something valuable and distinctive to say,” and has “a specialized strategy for social.”

For CEOs looking to start their social path, Colony prescribes a four part methodology that involves targeting the right audience, defining a clear reason to be social, setting up social expectations, and choosing the right platforms.

Recruiting and Scouting

Talent is a commodity. Facebook, Google and Twitter often cherry pick each others’ employees. The company with the brightest minds is the one that’s most likely to excel. As such, recruiting is key and social media gives CEOs the ability to scout out potential hires and follow what they’re posting and what others are posting about them.

In a related fashion, CEOs will scout out the competition and search for potential acquires via social media properties. Many executives have already been doing this for years. Venture capitalists like Fred Wilson, for instance, have discovered the added benefits of maintaining a professional blog.

Wilson uses his blog to find companies to invest in and build relationships with entrepreneurs. It’s certainly no coincidence, then, that Union Square Ventures has an impressive portfolio of companies that includes Fousquare, Twitter and Tumblr.

Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

“Every CEO has a CRM dashboard right now. In the future, every CEO will have a social media dashboard,” predicts Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi.

Niyogi asserts that the social media dashboard will become a fixture inside the enterprise. “Every business unit will be using social media within the enterprise – customer support will use it to answer questions using tools like CoTweet, sales organizations will use it to get a better read on what’s happening with their customers in real-time, marketing organizations will be using it as a new channel to connect with new or existing customers. It’s already happening right now.”

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

  

Older Adults Nearly Double Social Media Presence

August 30th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; Older Adults Nearly Double Social Media Presence

A new study from Pew Internet found that between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking site usage grew 88% among Internet users aged 55-64, and the 65 and older group’s social networking presence grew 100% in the same time frame.

Young people still dominate social networks like Facebook (Facebook), but their usage only grew 13% during the year covered by Pew’s report. Older adults are catching up at an incredibly quick pace, though it remains to be seen whether they will pass the youth or hit a ceiling at or below the usage levels reported by young adults and teens.

Older adults who use services like Twitter (Twitter) or Facebook are still in the minority amidst their peers. Pew reported about 10 months ago that 19% of all Internet (Internet) users use status updates, but only one in ten Internet users aged 50 and older used status updates or read ones written by others. That’s a lot more than there used to be, but it’s still a small group — especially when you consider the fact that Pew’s numbers only cover people who are on the Internet at all. Many people in that age group aren’t going online to begin with.

According to report author Mary Madden, e-mail still dominates interpersonal communication for the 50 and older set.

  

Social Networking Use Doubles Among Older Internet Users

August 27th, 2010 by Judge

According to Read Write Web; Social Networking Use Doubles Among Older Internet Users

pew_internet_logo.pngWhile young adults are the heaviest users of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, older users over 50 are starting to catch up. According to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 47% of Internet users between the ages of 50 and 64 and 25% of online adults over 65 now use social networking sites. Compared to just a year ago, the number of Internet users over 50 in the U.S. who use social networking services has nearly doubled.

Older Adults Love Facebook – Twitter Still Lagging Far Behind

The Pew report also notes that the number of older adults (50-64) who use Twitter or another status update service doubled from about 5% to 11% over the last year. Seniors (65+) are still lagging behind in the use of status update services, but while only about 1% of them used Twitter regularly in 2009, this number has now grown to 6%.

social_networking_older_adults.png

No matter the growing popularity of social networking services among older users, email and online news sites are still far more popular than Facebook and Twitter among this age group. Overall, 92% of all older adults and 89% of all seniors send or read email daily. With regards to online news gathering, 76% of older adults get their news online and 42% say they do so daily. Among seniors, about 62% look for news online and 34% say that they do so daily.

  

Social Media – Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy

August 26th, 2010 by Ernie

According to Mashable; Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy

The release of Facebook Places raised serious privacy concerns for users of the social network. Places allows users to alert their friends to where they are by checking-in to a nearby location, often via mobile phone. Users can also view the location of nearby friends and the information they’ve posted about locations.

Critics of the feature point out that under Places’ default setting, a user can tag a friend’s location even if that friend is not physically in that location. What’s more, all checkins will appear in the News Feed and activity stream for that place, unless otherwise specified. If this sounds like over-sharing to you and you’d like to opt out, you can change your privacy settings.

This isn’t the first time Facebook (Facebook) has received criticism for its privacy practices. In fact, Facebook’s problems stretch back to before its founding when then Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the school’s network to steal pictures of students for a site that ranked their attractiveness. Below is an infographic tracing the history of privacy snafus that have dogged the platform since its creation.

The graphic below was created for Mashable (Mashable) by Lisa Waananen.

Facebook Privacy Infographic

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U.S. advertising on social networks surges 20% to $1.68 billion, half of it on Facebook

August 25th, 2010 by Judge

According to LA Times: U.S. advertising on social networks surges 20% to $1.68 billion, half of it on Facebook

Graf Just after Facebook hit 500 million users last month, some analysts increased their 2010 forecasts for spending on social media advertising.

U.S. advertising is expected to increase 20% over last year to $1.68 billion, up from December’s forecast of $1.3 billion, according to a study by digital research group EMarketer.

“That’s primarily due to the strong performance of Facebook and somewhat due to the fact that we started adding Twitter to our analysis,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst.

The study, conducted every six months, also measures sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn and Classmates.com as well as popular sites in China, Japan and Russia for worldwide figures.

Half of that $1.68 billion spent by U.S. advertisers will go to Facebook, according to the study. By 2011, advertisers will spend $1.06 billion on the San Francisco company — a 112% increase from 2009.

Worldwide, overall social media ad spending is leveling off — except for on Facebook. Advertisers around the globe will pour an estimated $1.76 billion on the site in 2011, which is a 165% increase from 2009,  according to the study.

This means marketers recognize this is an easy way to reach consumers where they spend a lot of their time, Williamson said.

“Facebook has been one of the leaders in ways to advertise in social media,” she said. ”It’s become one of the go-to places for marketers.”

That’s largely because of Facebook’s self-serve advertising system — EMarketer estimated that it accounts for at least half of the company’s revenue, an increase from previous estimates.

“We underestimated how big that success was,” Williamson said. “I think it was a surprise for Facebook as well.”

The system allows marketers to create and post ads without having to go through a salesperson, which is unique to social media sites, Williamson said. Once an ad is created, users also have the option to “like” or “become a fan” of an ad, which Facebook then posts as suggestions to mutual friends.

But although marketing dollars are increasing in the millions, Williamson said Facebook is far too big for users to worry about being bombarded with ads.

“There’s plenty of opportunity and plenty of places to put advertising,” she said. “It’s been very minimalistic,  and that’s on purpose.”

Advertising on MySpace, which is refocusing on its roots in being a social media site for entertainment and music for youth, is on the decline. U.S. marketers will spend $323 million on the site, down from $445 million in 2009, EMarketer said. By 2011, U.S. and worldwide advertising on MySpace is estimated to decline about 38% from 2009 figures.

“It’s a smaller targeted audience,” Williamson said. “There are fewer advertisers who want to reach a youth market.”

– Kristena Hansen

Charts: U.S. advertising spending on social networking sites, by venue, for 2009 compared with 2010 forecast. Credit: EMarketer

  

Social Media – 5 Fab Twitter Follower Visualization Tools

August 24th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; 5 Fab Twitter Follower Visualization Tools

Twitter ArtWe’ve brought you a few roundups of some pretty cool Twitter visualization tools in the past, and now we’re back with five more for your Twitter-lovin’ pleasure.

The selection we’ve curated here concentrates on graphically presenting your followers, contacts and various snippets of information related to them.

If you’re interested in seeing what your Twitter (Twitter) followers look like as a keyword cloud, on parade, or even on a mug, then have a look at the tools below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

1. TwitterSheep

This is a really simple, but super fun way to look at your Twitter followers. TwitterSheep generates a keyword cloud based on the text in your followers’ bios. To generate a cloud of your own (or indeed a cloud for anyone else’s Twitter name) just head on over to the site, enter the name and within minutes you can have your own keyword cloud that you can choose to tweet out to your “flock.”

2. 5k Twitter Browser

Neuro Productions’ Flash-based Twitter browser is a spacey way to “see” connections on Twitter, something that is nearly impossible on the site itself. Start with any Twitter user’s name and the app will load up a circle of contacts, their thumbnail pic and latest tweet. Click on a contact in that circle and it will do the same, endlessly creating visual connections that people have made across the social networking site as long as you keep clicking.

3. ISParade

Quite possibly the most fun you can have with Twitter, this Japanese app will create an animated parade of your Twitter contacts complete with, in our opinion, the “bounciest” music we’ve ever heard. If you haven’t seen this yet, then we really don’t want to spoil the fun of discovering it by saying too much more. Head on over and try it out now!

4. TweepsKey

This clever app uses good ol’ arithmetic to generate an intelligent graph of your Twitter followers, displaying “tweeps” as differently colored and sized dots across an X, Y and Z axis. Where the tweep is placed depends on the tweets a follower has tweeted and how many followers they have, while the size and color of the tweep relates to data on their followers. It may sound a little complicated, but it’s worth a go to see how your personal Twitterverse appears.

5. Crowded Ink “Friends” Mug

Crowded Ink’s online mug-making tool takes all your Twitter follower’s thumbnail images and plasters them to the surface of a $15 Zazzle mug, offering you a fun way to display your very own little part of the Twitterverse. As well as generating a design for your username, you can easily do the same for others, so there’s some serious gift potential here for a Twitter-loving buddy.

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