Archive for the ‘Business Social Networking’ Category

Experts Share Their Predictions for Social Media in 2010

Monday, December 28th, 2009

What will 2010 bring for Social Media? The experts have weighed in.

TrendsSportting Market Research has released its report on 2010 Social Media predictions. The report is comprised of educated opinions from some of the biggest names in the game. David Meerman Scott, Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Pete Cashmore, and also the team at eMarketer all give their forecast.

The forecast they’re each painting has some common trends.

The experts are betting we’ll see a stronger push into mobile landscapes and location based networking & marketing. Transparency will continue gain steam as the most important thing for brands to keep in mind, and it’s no secret everyone will be paying much more attention to Social Media Measurement and ROI in  2010. Many people are predicting a shift from the enormous social networks we know today, to smaller and more segmented communities.

You can check out the entire slide show right here, then let us know your thoughts in the comments:

Social Media for the Evolving Business

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Social media is slowly changing the face of how businesses get, respond, and discover new information. Those that do not adapt will simply die, but the ones that embrace social media, will undoubtedly succeed and be seen as leaders in that field of business.

Courtesy of @Mashable, here are four ways that social media is altering businesses:

1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”

Show some personality, that is part of your brand. Engage with your customers by telling them what’s going on when the 9-5 job ends. If you’re transparent and “put yourself out there,” people feel more comfortable about doing business with those companies.

business social networking

2. From”Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”

Less is more.

Less is more. It bears repeating. The cliché of the decade, but it couldn’t be more true, especially when opting to use social media in your business plan. Focus on the niche mediums that your target audience utilizes. This allows you to better connect and track them; you won’t be wasting millions of dollars blasting your message to world, not knowing who saw it and if they responded to your call-to-action.
People share stories through the web. It is much faster. So if your customer has a negative experience, you need to make sure you address their concerns before it becomes too viral. It pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.

3. From “Controlling our Image” to “Being Ourselves”

This reinforces rule #1 — personality. Don’t control your employees so that your company is portrayed as this squeaky-clean, monotonous factory. Allow your employees to write and talk about hobbies that they’re passionate about outside of work.
Take a page from Google’s 70/20/10 rule, which allows employees to spend 20% of their time on “Innovation time off” pursuing their own ideas that relate to Google and then 10% of their time on stuff completely unrelated to Google. “By doing this, Google gains a loyal employee by allowing them to do whatever they want without Big Brother looking over their shoulder.  At the same time, it captures innovative thinking due to random stimulation.” (the99percent)

4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

People want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, etc. Company telephone numbers and e-mail addresses will not suffice any longer. If I’m loyal to a brand, and I see that they use Twitter or Facebook often, it makes me feel more comfortable knowing I can communicate with their company through those means. Allow customers to communicate through their chosen means, not yours.

Don’t be dinosaur and stick with what you’re comfortable with (i.e. old media). You’ll go extinct like they did. Instead, jump ship to where the future of interactivity is going.

LinkedIn and Twitter Join Forces

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Earlier this week, social networking mega-sites LinkedIn and Twitter joined forces. Why it didn’t happen sooner is anyone’s guess.

Both companies, now synced, earn ample benefits from their respective partners, such as data exchange and worthwhile business intelligence. LinkedIn users will able to update their statuses more frequently and appeal to a younger demographic. Twitter can gain access to LinkedIn’s influential and growing user base.

In your LinkedIn settings, you can link your account to Twitter to allow for every tweet to be posted as your LinkedIn status, or just the ones that include either the #li or #in hashtag.

Where this ends up is anyones guess, but for now, enjoy the new networking feature.

Delicious Organizes Your Favorite Websites

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Social bookmarking site Delicious.com helps you keep track of all the sites you want to remember. It’s free and easy to use.

Simply register for a Delicious account and upload the “Tag” button to your browser. This will make it quicker and easier to bookmark pages you find interesting.

Suppose you’re trying to find information on Google Ad Words. You search the Internet and find a page you like. Tag the site, and a window will open asking for new information. This is where you can input relevant keywords, or tags, that will allow you to return to this specific Web site link after you’ve accrued different Web site links

Say you tag one article as “Fundamentals,” because it’s a useful site about getting started with Google Ad Words.

Delicious Organizes Your Favorite Websites

A few weeks pass and you accumulate more links.

Let’s say you want to return to the introduction to Ad Words article, the one tagged “Fundamentals.” Click the tag on the right-hand sidebar that says “Fundamentals,” and immediately, your list will consolidate to show just the links you tagged with “Fundamentals.”

Now lets see why Delicious is “social bookmarking.”

There are lots of other marketers and advertisers using Ad Words, and they’ve probably come across some useful sites that you’ve missed. Delicious’ bookmarks are made public. This means peers can see your bookmarks and use your tags; your bookmarks can benefit other people.

Delicious takes the most-clicked on article from that keyword and shifts it to the top. So the most applicable and trustworthy site is the first one users can select. Because they’re all public, everyone discovers new and relevant information. Together, this creates a steady stream of useful Web sites, all linked together by tags.

The lesson is that social bookmarking takes a world of chaos and make it orderly and helpful for other people.

Changing Media Lanscape - Shift Happens, Fall 2009

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Did You Know 4.0?

You should.

Did you know that newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years? But in the last five years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

While traditional advertising continues its steep decline, mobile and Internet advertising are up 18.1 and 9.2 percent, respectively.

More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC and CBS, had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948.

Those statistics were just in the first minute. If you those are startling, watch the rest of the video.

LinkedIn Keeps Growing

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

LinkedIn’s blog is reporting they now have over 50 million users worldwide. They say it took almost sixteen months for LinkedIn to reach its first million users. Their last million? Only took 12 days. This comes on the heels of even more good news, as Compete reported a 5.68% growth in traffic for LinkedIn during the month of September.

LinkedIn stats from Compete

LinkedIn says that while 50% of its users are based in the US, 50% are international. An impressive stat that speaks highly to the power and success of LinkedIn. If you have somehow managed to stay away from LinkedIn to this point, now is as good of a time as any to jump on the wagon. Business is being done here, and soon every business man and woman will have their profile on LinkedIn.

Social Media Success for Ford Motor Company

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Ford Motor Company has embraced social media quite well. They are definitely generating more chatter and buzz about their brand than any of the other “Big 3″ have.

Today we’re taking a look at their Ford Fiesta Movement as it nears the end of the six month campaign. Remember when this grassroots social media campaign started? Has it worked?

To promote their Fiesta model, Ford gave 100 social “agents” a Fiesta and had them promote the new vehicle through all kinda of social media avenues, such as Twitter, blogs, videos, and events. So did they make it work without spending a dollar on traditional media?

Ford shared some interesting statistics today. They recorded:

  • 4.3 million YouTube views thus far
  • 500,000+ Flickr views
  • 3 million+ Twitter impressions
  • 50,000 interested potential customers, 97% of which do not currently own a Ford

These numbers obviously indicate interest in their brand and product. It’s essentially priceless to have over 8 million eyes see personal advertising. When it’s all said and done however, Fiesta sales will have to determine whether it was a successful marketing plan. Those 50,000 interested potential customers will have a large impact on social media campaigns going forward.

Socialnomics and The Social Media Revolution

Monday, August 24th, 2009

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers

96% of them have joined a Social Network.

80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.

The largest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements.

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Watch this video for much more eye-opening statistics!

(statistics and video are from Socialnomics blog)

Number of Social Networking Users Doubles Since 2007

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

With Facebook and Twitter grabbing national news headlines, it may not be all that surprising to hear the number of users on social networking sites has doubled since 2007. However, the numbers are staggering to look at.

Almost 1/3 of the US population - 55.6 million adults to be specific - visit social networking sites at least monthly. This according to the latest report from Forrester Research. That number was 15% in 2007 and only up to 18% last year in 2008.

This puts the popularity of social networking among adults higher than instant messaging, streaming music, and reading blogs. Here is the complete breakdown from Forrester’s report:

forrester-study

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the tools driving these online activities (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at the moment) are constantly evolving. It is imperative for companies and their team members to be in position to benefit from these new technologies. If you simply cannot allocate the time and resources within to keep your company in the conversation, look for custom outsourcing options. You do not want to get passed up and left behind in the social conversation on the web.

Effectively Using Social Media for Business

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Social Media tactics can be tough to measure and monetize, unless you do social media the right way. Today’s gleaming example comes our way from Starbucks. You may have heard Starbucks wanted to give away a free pastry with the purchase of a drink. And their savvy social media tactics are the reason you heard that.

Let’s start with their Facebook promotion. They created an Event, Starbucks Free Pastry Day: July 21, 2009, which by last count had nearly 600,000 “confirmed guests” on Facebook alone. That is a whole lot of foot traffic for Starbucks around the map, but we said “start” with Facebook because the biggest piece of their promotion puzzle was Twitter.

Twitter has an immense amount of potential when executing a promotion. We’ve seen a couple media companies in the recent past, Squarespace and Moonfruit, use hash-tags (#squarespace) to spread the word on Twitter. Their promotions actually required Twitter users to use that hash-tag in a tweet in order to be entered for a prize. It worked. Their names (because so many people were using their hash-tag) quickly jumped into Twitter’s top Trending Topics. Due to Starbucks already established brand and recognizable name, the Twitter population did the work, by simply doing what the do every day, tweeting. By just telling friends, family, and other “followers” they were headed to Starbucks or just got a free pastry, Trending Topics was soon taken over by “Starbucks” - thus adding fuel to the flames. Below is a graph from Twist showing Starbucks mentions as a percentage of total tweets. Their mentions were up nearly ten times due to their promotion.

Starbucks Twitter Measure

As you can see, social media can absolutely be measured and monetized, if done correctly. Early evaluations look promising, and despite a fair amount of negative blog posts about individual hiccups, the data indicates this promotion was a success for Starbucks.

One company, local here to the Ann Arbor, Michigan area, just jumped into the social media space with a Facebook promotion of their own. That company is Weber’s, a boutique hotel/upscale restaurant/ultralounge that has always had a terrific following via word-of-mouth, but like everyone else it was time to take that online. They kicked off their Facebook Page opening with a giveaway (are you getting the hint that we all love free stuff?!). With a beautiful landing page setup (taken down after the promotion expired) at Facebook, they emailed their existing client database with the offer to enter for a chance to win 1 of 50 free rooms at the hotel. The email gave them the Facebook fan page link and simply required they “become a Fan” to enter. Within 3 days of launching their Facebook fan Page, Weber’s had over 500 Fans and an interactive Wall packed with compliments and praises.

It certainly helped in Weber’s case to have a Facebook Page that was clean and professionally complete with photos, visual tabs, and a thorough company bio. You can check it out at facebook.com/WebersAnnArbor. They definitely disproved the myth that small businesses can’t effectively use, measure, and monetize social media. Execute them correctly and Facebook + Twitter can equal big rewards for your company.