Tag: Social media

Six Social Media Trends For 2011

It was a banner year for social media growth and adoption. We witnessed Facebook overtake Google in most weekly site traffic, while some surveys reported nearly 95% of companies using LinkedIn to help in recruiting efforts. In my outlook for last year, I cited that mobile would become a lifeline to those looking for their social media fixes, and indeed the use of social media through mobile devices increased in the triple digits.

I also outlined how “social media would look less social” or more accurately exclusive, and indeed, we’ve seen the re-launch of Facebook groups, which focus on niche interactivity, and more recently, the emergence of Path, billed as “the social network for intimate friends” which limits your network to only 50 people. The past year also saw some brands go full throttle on Foursquare’s game-like geo-location platform, attempting to reward mayors and creating custom badges for the network’s power users.

In other areas, such as social media policy, I was less accurate. Conversations around the topic did begin to take place, But a global survey indicated that only 29 percent of companies even have a social media policy. That’s not as high as I expected.

via darmano.typepad.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d get the 6 trends…

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Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 12, 2010

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Why 2011 will be the year of social-media convergence

2011 will be the year of convergence and integration. Fueled partially by consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, and partially by API mashups, we’ll see huge progress in unifying social communication. We’ve been talking about “one-to-one marketing” for 20 years, but in 2011 we’ll finally start to see it become a reality.

Nearly every major announcement and R&D trend in the social industry revolves around adding data or layers of connectivity. Just in the past few weeks you have Facebook integrating e-mail, PostRank integrating Facebook data, Bing integrating Facebook data, Cotweet integrating with ExactTarget (they’re clients of mine), and several others.

Soon, we’ll be able to send an e-mail just to customers that clicked a particular bit.ly link on Twitter. We’ll be able to send a Facebook status message just to customers who visited a particular page on our website. By combining what we know about our customers and prospects and friends across multiple social outposts, we’ll end up with a centralized view of each of our connections. This finally will give us the ability to in a meaningful way segment our social communication. Today, Twitter is the same as the “batch and blast” e-mail campaigns of the past, when every subscriber got the same message, regardless of their preferences and purchase history. It’s going to change.

Social media will become targetable.

via smartblogs.com

Follow the ‘via’ link if you want to know more…

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I love the way that @kellyneuville thinks!

e1evation gets top billing on his blogroll! Have you checked out his new blog at http://socialmediaismessy.com? His transformation to ‘social media maven’ at Envano has truly been a thing of beauty to behold. He inspires me [and curates great content for me] every day in Google Reader, on Twitter and in his blog. In a short period of time, he has become a ‘must follow’ in Northeast Wisconsin…

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Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 10, 2010

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Consumers More Likely to Use Businesses Active on Social Media

Image representing Yelp as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Seven out of 10 consumers are more likely to use a local business if it has information available on a social media site, says a new study.

The annual study, called Local Search Usage Study: Bridging The Caps, From Search to Sales, is a joint effort of comScore and TMP Directional Marketing, a local search marketing firm. It includes an online survey of some 4,000 consumers, plus data gleaned from observing one million consumers who agreed to have their online searches monitored anonymously.

Having a page on Facebook is a start, but it’s not a one-time effort: 81 percent of consumers using social media say it’s important for businesses to respond to questions and complaints. And for the record, you do need to worry about reviews and ratings – 78 percent said they’re important when deciding what to buy.

What else do you need to be doing with social media? Nearly four out of five (78 percent) of users want special offers, promotions, and information about events, 74 percent want regular posts about products, and 72 percent want posts about the company itself. (Wondering about posting those photos of the company office—or picnic? Two-thirds of those surveyed want to see them.)

If this all seems too daunting, the survey also suggests a simple starting place: make sure there is correct information about your business in as many places online as you can (Google, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Social networkers are 67 percent more likely to buy something than general searchers, but one in six searchers is frustrated by the lack of reliable information about small businesses on the Web – either it’s not there at all, it’s incorrect, or it’s confusing or disorderly. One third of searchers give up on a business when they can’t quickly find the information they’re looking for.

via inc.com

Wow. Just wow. You can follow the ‘via’ link if you’d like to read the rest of the article. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect and discuss how this applies to your business. Thanks to Dana VanDen Heuvel for tweeting this…

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Create a Social Media Optimized Email Signature with WiseStamp

via blog.hubspot.com

I’ve posted about WiseStamp several times on the blog — you can see them all here. For those of you who did not heed my advice earlier, I offer you this excellent step by step guide to installation. It’s the perfect compliment to Google Apps for Business and Chrome and I highly recommend it…

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Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 9, 2010

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Social Media Landscape

via socialmediagraphics.posterous.com

h/t Kelly Neuville…

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Seesmic.com gets a facelift

via blog.seesmic.com

Personally, I prefer HootSuite — although sometimes my interactions with their support team combined with their new freemium program make me wonder why. Seesmic.com meets all my criteria for a good social media monitoring tool; “good, fast, and cheap” and completely cross platform [including mobile]. Unfortunately, it’s lacking a couple of tools I need from HootSuite, namly autoposting of two rss feeds [free] and team tweeting [which is not]. You could overcome the first shortcoming by using dlvr.it and perhaps the second by using CoTweet, but that would violate one of my essential maxims: “Never use two tools when only one will do”. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

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7+ Tools for Turning the Tide

I had the honor yesterday of team teaching a social media ‘bootcamp’ with super smart social media guy Dana VanDen Heuvel [I know! Why was I team teaching with him?!]. Apparently Dana finds some value in my ‘practical, tactical’ approach to social media implementation so he asked me to share it with the class…

Me? I think people who believe that social media marketing could be valuable for their business are immediately faced with the question of ‘how do I add social media to my overflowing plate and still get home for supper?’. If that’s true then we need a simple toolbox to help us go from being overwhelmed by data to effectively managing and producing it. This is my current thinking about the ‘7+ Tools for Turning the Tide’ [the plus is for retail destinations that would also benefit from location-based social media]…

http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/71029957/7-top-tools-for-turning-the-infotide?width=550&height=400&zoom=1&live_update=1

Before you tweet back that this is way oversimplified, remember where most aspiring thought leaders are at! That’s why I use three maxims to guide my choice of tools:

  • “Things must be made as simple as possible but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
  • “Never use two tools where one will do.” Paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson
  • “The tools must be ‘good, fast and cheap’, completely cross platform, and available anywhere/anytime [which means they are web and mobile based].” Todd Lohenry

This mindmap is a revision of my now ‘world famous’ series ‘The Top 10 Tools for Tightening your Tribe‘ — the missing technology toolkit for Seth Godin’s book ‘Tribes‘. You’ll see that some of the tools have changed [I’ve moved to Chrome from Firefox, for example] but the principles are enduring and many tools have stood the test of time over the past year — a lifetime in the social media space…

Questions? Feedback? Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 4, 2010

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World’s Top Social Media Sites

via socialnomics.net

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4% of online Americans use location-based services

In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla use internet-connected mobile devices’ geolocation capabilities to let users notify others of their locations by “checking in” to that location. Location-based services often run on stand-alone software applications, or “apps,” on most major GPS-enabled smartphones or other devices.

via pewinternet.org

But which 4% — are they key influencers or just geeks & weirdos or both? Follow the ‘via’ link to find out…

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Automated social media sentiment monitors are 65% accurate

via holykaw.alltop.com

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What Is a Landing Page and Why Should You Care

Too many companies send their advertising, email, or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a huge missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can increase the likelihood of converting that traffic into leads by using a targeted landing page.

For example, imagine you have a Google AdWords PPC ad running for one of your best keywords. Even if you advertise how great your company is (a boring offer for any company) and someone (amazingly) clicks through on that ad, do you want to send them to your homepage? When they land on your homepage, what are they supposed to do? What do you want them to do? Once you figure out what you want the visitor to do, make it easier for them to do just that. Send them to a landing page that prompts them to complete that action. You’ll see the effectiveness of your online marketing improve dramatically.

via blog.hubspot.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like…

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Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, I'm especially mindful of my clients and my social media friends who have been such a tremendous help to me throughout this entire year — thank you so much for all you have done to help me [and my family] through our work together! May all your Thanksgiving wishes come true as you celebrate [in my mind] the best of all the holidays…

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Social Media Marketing According to Dwight Schrute

via flowtown.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

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Shareaholic has been successfully upgraded

via shareaholic.com

Shareaholic just did a major overhaul to their Firefox version. Whether I’m using Firefox or Chrome, this is the one indispensable addition for social media success. Try it and see why…

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Bishops urged to embrace social media to evangelize effectively

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglica...
Image via Wikipedia

Social media is not only here to stay but should be recognized and used as a “new form of pastoral ministry,” U.S. bishops were told Nov. 15 in their annual meeting.

“Social media is proving itself to be a force with which to be reckoned. If not, the church may be facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation,” said Bishop Ronald P. Herzog of Alexandria, La., a member of the bishops’ Committee on Communications, in an address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.

Bishop Herzog noted that although social media has been around for less than 10 years, it lacks the “makings of a fad” and is “causing as fundamental a shift in communication patterns and behavior as the printing press did 500 years ago.”

“I don’t think I have to remind you of what happened when the Catholic Church was slow to adapt to that new technology,” he told the bishops. “By the time we decided to seriously promote that common folk should read the Bible, the Protestant Reformation was well under way.”

via uscatholic.org
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10 Reasons Not To Ignore Your Blog For Facebook

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

Brace yourself: Facebook is trying to take over the world. Or, if not the world, at least the entire Internet. With Facebook partnering up with popular sites like Yelp, many SMB owners may feel as if their load got lighter. I mean, why waste time worrying about your building your blog or your own site when you can grow your Facebook presence instead? If Facebook’s opening up the doors so that people can take you with them, you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, right?

Wrong!

It doesn’t matter how hot Facebook or any of the other social media sites are looking right now. You still need to be focused on using your blog to create your own authority and brand. Want to know why?

Here are ten reasons.

via smallbiztrends.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 10 reasons. #1? You don’t own Facebook…

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