In an information-saturated online marketing world, it can be challenging to find relevant content on a regular basis without committing valuable time. Using feed readers can cut through the clutter by customizing your view of the Web.
Feed readers aggregate new content from multiple sources— blogs, news sites, and multimedia— using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology, allowing you to quench your thirst for a particular field without visiting individual websites. Given its utter simplicity and its extreme utility, it astonishes me that I still have friends who haven’t yet set up a feed reader. Continue reading »
5 Comments- Feb 09
- 24
What did your social media consultant do before social media?
- Posted by Eric Pratum
- Published in Social Media Marketing
You lost your job? You have some experience marketing? Thinking about becoming a new media marketing consultant? You have a Twitter or Facebook account? Social media is big right now, is it not? You could be a social media consultant! Continue reading »
11 Comments- Feb 09
- 19
The Confession Virus: Facebook’s “25 Things” Takes Over the System
- Posted by Megan Weintraub
- Published in Social Networks
The first time one of my Facebook friends posted a note listing “25 random things” about her offline self, I was slightly embarrassed for her. Was she lonely? Should I call her? What would compel her to draft a note to 25 of her online friends with a list of facts that ran from highly confessional to simply idiosyncratic?
The “25 random things” list has embodied the social media zeitgeist of late, which is to say, for the past week or so. Like most online cultural phenomena, reactions to the exercise run from disgusted eye rolls to exuberant participation. One friend posted Facebook status updates throughout the week stating defiantly that he would not, under any circumstances, be compiling a list of his own random facts. Roughly four days later, he changed his status to, “I gave in,” and sure enough, he had written a list of his own that was at turns illuminating and captivatingly mundane. It didn’t take me long to join him in posting my own list.
Inevitably, we will all forget the “25 things” list phenomenon by next week. We’ll be back to creating our own Shepard Fairey images on Obamicon or sending breakdance e-cards. Before the moment passes, however, it seems worthwhile to look at the exercise as a salient example of both social and viral media.
Can we pinpoint where the social part ends and the viral part begins? That is to say, at what moment does the exercise move from one that is shared among members of a group to one that carries its own momentum to self-perpetuate and even influence people outside of the immediate group?
If we examine the “25 things” list, we see that built into its structure is a method to turn the list from merely social to significantly viral: tagging. At the top of each “25 things” list is a set of rules:
“Once you have been tagged you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you because they want to know more about you.”
The instructions then tell the user exactly which buttons to use to find and tag people and then publish the new list. Tagging becomes a vehicle to viral because it disseminates content extremely rapidly among a group of 25 people who are all connected to hundreds more online friends beyond the intended audience of the note. While tagging does not guarantee viral success, it does increase the odds. Imagine if 25 people compiled individual lists and then tagged 25 unique friends, and then those 25 friends tagged 25 more? Within minutes, 15,625 people could potentially be exposed to the “25 things” virus.
Regardless of their personal feelings about the general usefulness or value of “25 things” (or even Facebook, for that matter), marketers can learn lessons from this phenomenon. Why did “25 things” become a viral sensation?
- It was simple.
Participants in the “25 things” challenge were handed nothing but a blank canvas and straightforward directions for how to get started. - It “sold” compelling content.
Online readers are consumers. No, they’re not necessarily clicking on ads or filling shopping carts, but they are consuming information and ideas with alacrity. - It took advantage of network effects.
As exemplified by my friend who finally “gave in,” the power of the network is in its insidious ability to convince you that you’re missing out on a global activity. “25 things” spread rapidly because its influence grew beyond the individual nodes; it began to affect enough people that it felt somehow rude to shun the invitations to participate.
Of course, it’s difficult to predict the effects of any virus. Some lie dormant for years. Others flare up and then quickly die. While no one can estimate exactly how long or far the “25 things” virus will travel before it runs its course, we can be sure it will leave its mark on the Facebook community
No Comments- Feb 09
- 17
MySpace and Facebook: Key Differences to Understand Before Marketing
- Posted by David Concepcion
- Published in Company News
About a year or so back, I wondered what happened to all my friends on MySpace. I knew a lot of them from another social network site that was dwindling, but I could always find them updating their pages on MySpace. They were soon MIA from there as well. I emailed a friend of mine and asked her what was going on. She simply said that everyone was basically migrating to Facebook.
The statistical data shows that MySpace is still the largest and most active social networking site. Hitwise.com has MySpace at number three on their top 20 Website lis
t with a 3.71% market share of internet traffic; Facebook is number six with a 1.65% market share. While MySpace is still number one by clear margins, Facebook has been creeping up over the last 18 months. The anecdotal information seems to bear this out as well. I have been friend requested more and more by friends on Facebook whom I first met on MySpace in the last few months than ever before. I know that my personal perceptions are trumped by data from Hitwise, and this is a debate that’s been going on for at least a year and is still raging, so don’t expect me to definitively settle this at all. However what this really comes down to is the basic marketing maxim of knowing your audience and using the best site for what you need.
If you’re a comedian, an artist, in a band, or made a film, you need a MySpace page. The ability to design your own page template, 
post your own videos, songs, photos, etc. makes this the ideal site to market your art—whatever that may be. While getting friend requested by people you’ve never heard of can be annoying, for the artist trying to gain an audience it is one of the most beneficial word of mouth methodologies you can use. When I was creating my web series, I used MySpace to put out the casting notices as well as track down a couple of actors that were otherwise unreachable. I was able to gain a specific fan base and even hire a makeup artist for the show as time went on. For all the friending of strippers and bands you have to go through on MySpace, if you are in any kind of artistic field you are going to need this site.
The use of Facebook is different. If you want to track down old high school friends, college friends, business acquaintances, favorite hot dog vendors, you’ll be able to find each other on Facebook. Where you may not realize the page for “~I AM DA BOMB FO’SHO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~” on MySpace is an old college bud, Facebook makes it easier to figure that out. Plus asking “are you such-and-such” in the friend request seems to cut through the confusion. Marketing yourself here is trickier in that you are among friends, not an expanding audience. If you’re planning a big get together for friends, it’s great; if you want to hype a new product, not so much. However, empirical data shows that the ads posted on Facebooks get more productive cost-per-click ads than on MySpace, and the crowd on Facebook tends to be more affluent.
However there are definite times when being among friends works for you. If you’re looking for work you want to ask people you know—four out of five jobs are found this way. The various groups on Facebook are much more straightforward, easy to join and start posting for things. The community is also great moral support. In these tough times, when I was going through my job malaise, the simple status message of “David is DESPERATELY LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB!” was enough to get my Facebook friends to lend a good ear. One of them told me to send my resume to a recruiting friend of theirs. Different social networks, different purposes, different results.
Whether MySpace is adding the application ability that Facebook has had on for the last year is eventually irrelevant. What’s important is knowing your product and who to speak to. If you know your product, you know the audience you need to reach; knowing that can help you figure out which social network to be on. It’s good to be on both sites but for different reasons on being on either.
3 Comments- Feb 09
- 10
Social Media Campaigns Aren’t “Replacing” Anything
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Social Media Marketing
Whenever I hear someone talking about the use of social media or about how social media campaigns are going to replace e-mail marketing, direct marketing, public relations or stunt campaigns, I cringe. Early last year, we wrote that there are more ways to reach an audience than ever before. And even in the current economic climate, in which business ar
e reducing marketing budgets while devoting larger chunks of the remaining dollars to online media of one form or another, it is reckless and silly to talk about one marketing channel obsoleting another. Social media, by definition, is collaborative, and effective social media campaigns are always designed with synergy in mind.
This is nowhere more evident than with e-mail marketing. E-mail is already a fairly social marketing channel. Companies send small polls, surveys, and contests in many of their mailings, and an even higher percentage of mailings feature a call to action for the recipient to forward the e-mail to a friend. For a medium that, at its core, is interruptive and monologic, e-mail does a surprisingly good job fostering interactivity and community. Better than perhaps any other method, e-mail allows companies to directly target and engage an audience that has universally expressed interest (by opting to receive the e-mails). What e-mail cannot do, however, is bring customers into direct contact with a company and with each other. Social media can, of course, through blogs or social networks or video or Twitter.
But the larger point is that, when combined, e-mail and social media complement one another and shore up their respective weaknesses to such a significant degree that it’s almost impossible to see how some marketers came to the conclusion that social media campaigns would replace e-mail marketing campaigns. If you want to give customers an avenue for discussion, for instance, you can add information about a company Facebook page (or even an internal forum) to your mailings, thereby giving your e-mail audience a direct path to that discussion. Conversely, you can feature opt-in links for your mailing list on Facebook so that people who discover the page organically can easily subscribe to the e-mail list. This is just one of many simple and straightforward ways e-mail and social media can work together.
But enough with the simple ways. There are far more interesting approaches that leverage the synergy between e-mail and social media campaigns. You could use e-mail to promote the initial launch of a promotional or viral video, or use a blog as an informative tool that is also a gateway to premium content distributed only by e-mail. You could leverage social network presence to make your e-mail seem more disarming and familiar, or use both e-mail and social networks to push a contest, game, incentive program, or sale. And as more people enter the social web and mobile e-mail clients continue to improve, there will only be more opportunities like these.
I think the mistake people make when they discount these synergistic strategies is to assume that e-mai
l campaigns should promote social media, or that social media campaigns should somehow promote e-mail. It is, of course, ridiculous to use one marketing channel to promote yet another marketing channel, and any company who does so will not have an effective marketing program. To take the first simple example I gave, the synergy I’m talking about has nothing to do with sending an e-mail to your subscribers that tells them your company now has a Facebook page. It has everything to do with adding a small panel to your e-mails that simply tells your subscribers that, should they wish to connect on Facebook, your company is there. Regardless of what marketing channel or combination of channels you are using, your priority must be to give value to your customers.
It’s important to remember that word of mouth marketing and social media campaigns have a somewhat unique ability to act as the proverbial glue that holds a larger marketing program together. Whereas TV advertising, publicity stunts, and even e-mail can’t access targets within their comfort zone, social media’s pervasive presence can. It is the casual voice, the near-constant presence, and the reinforcer. Social media has no means, no method, and no desire to supplant other marketing channels. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
3 Comments- Feb 09
- 6
When you automate Twitter, respect your audience
- Posted by Eric Pratum
- Published in Advice and Tips, Social Media
Technology should make our lives easier, and the internet, in part, should bring us information faster and allow us to communicate better. Many of these benefits result due to automation of previously manual tasks. For example, do you remember AIM’s news ticker? Who needed to check news websites when you could just have that open and click on the headlines you liked?
Okay, maybe that’s a bit old for some of us. How about RSS feeds for news sites? Who needs to check CNN.com when you can just grab the RSS feed and be alerted about new stories?
One of the nice things about RSS is that it automatically brings news to me. New post on your blog? I don’t have to remember to check every day. RSS tells me when there’s something new.
Similar to this, we’ve seen the emergence of auto-tweeting in the last year. For those of you who don’t know, services like Twitterfeed allow twitterers to auto-tweet any RSS feed. Mostly, that takes the form of, for example, “New blog post: Day 46 of the Mayonnaise Diet http://nondescriptURL.com.”
As well, services like Tweetlater and SocialToo allow twitterers to automatically direct message or @ reply new followers. Sometimes, that takes the form of, “Just wanted to say hi and thanks for following. Looking forward to tweeting with you.”
These are great tools when used politely, but too many people have gotten lazy with these things and are obnoxiously taking advantage of them.
The problem that many of us have is the blatant, over-the-top advertising that is done. Personally, I think Twitterfeed is really useful. I like knowing when my tweeple post something new. I won’t always read their stuff, but at least, I have the option. The problem comes when you auto-tweet things like, “If I suggested you read one thing today, it’d be this http://URLshorteningservice.com.” To me, that sounds like you found something interesting, and you’re not just shamelessly promoting yourself.
Have a new blog post? Think it’s spectacular? Set your auto-tweet to begin with something like, “My new blog post,” not, “Let me mislead you just to increase my pageviews.”
Now, a lot of so called Twitter experts will complain about auto-tweets for hellos. Truth be told, I think they’re great. I simply cannot send a personal hello to everyone that follows me within a short time of them doing so. Sometimes, I’m too busy. Other times, I’m just not on Twitter. So, what do I do? I auto-direct message a polite hello and then follow up later with a personal hello to anyone that has responded.
This has two benefits. One, it’s simple for me to welcome people, and two, it cuts down the number of people I have to say hi to because there are so many twitterers that follow just to see if you will follow back, but they have no genuine interest in you. So, I figure that, if they message me back with a hello, I should take the time to check out their profiles, maybe their blogs too, and then tweet them a genuine greeting.
The followers that I ignore are the ones that direct message me something like, “Your the coolest person ever! So, I’m giving you access to my new top-secret post on making money the easy way http://ShameShameShame.com.” Notice the confusion between your and you’re, as well as the person just assuming I’m interested in that sort of post, and saying I’m the coolest person ever when s/he likely has never met, or even heard about, me? That’s just poor and annoying salesmanship there.
Chris Brogan would say, “I offered to shake your hand, and you stuck your tongue down my throat. Yuck.” Wait until you’ve built a relationship with me before you assume I’m even interested in your moneymaking tips. If I am, you’ll get lots of pageviews from me instead of just an immediate unfollow due to the uncouth hello you just sent.
What does this all mean? Automation services are great when used correctly. When they’re used incorrectly, they burn bridges that you’ve barely begun to build. Go ahead and auto direct message me a hello and maybe even your URL. Go ahead and auto-tweet your new blog post. Just don’t make any assumptions about what your new followers are interested in, and definitely, do not mislead them. This way, you can join the ranks of Twitter for Smart People and not Twitter for the Socially Inept.
5 Comments
Twitter’s Value Has Been Proven, But What About The Shorty Awards?
At this point in its evolution, enough businesses have found effective ways to use Twitter as an effective communications tool to successfully squash those who still doubt its impact. Yes, it can actually be used for something other than posting stupid pictures of your cat or tell your friends what you just ate for lunch.
While Twitter’s ranking on the “shiny new toy” scale has waned recently, you should never worry that there isn’t always something new waiting in the wings to hold the attention of social media geeks around the world few more minutes.
Enter: The Shorty Awards - for the best producers of short (140 characters or less on Twitter) content in 2008.
While it has evolved and proven itself, Twitter is still a pretty immature technology. If Twitter is like high school, consider the Shorty Awards a loosely organized popularity contest, complete with class clowns attempting to stuff the ballot box.
The Shorty Awards are completely driven users tweeting their votes and nominations for their favorite users in a number of different categories (best brand, advertising, business education, etc) helping to organically spread the word about the contest and spur even more voting.
But the truth is that most viral content on the web is complete fluff – eye catching, but lacking in any sort of real value, and that is where the Shorty Awards come in. As long as you have your expectations in order, you won’t miss a thing. Just try replacing The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal by getting all your real news from Digg.com and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And no, I’m not calling the latest apple product news or tech toy “real news.”
After a quick look at the list of Shorty Award nominees and those that weren’t named (but clearly should have been) it is clear that this is really just a group of Twitter users who have become the best at pimping themselves out to their followers with no clear understanding why they were doing it in the first place. The contest may be one of the worst ways of actually measuring public opinion, but may do a pretty decent job at measuring someone’s ability to blindly market themselves for an award that they themselves don’t completely understand the value of.
Everyone wanted to win, but no one is quite sure why. There is no big prize at the end. No BusinessWeek cover story. You just know that someone else wants it, and on that premise alone, so do you. Thankfully not everyone was so heavily struck with a case of shiny new toy syndrome and were actually able to call the Shorty Awards by what they actually are.
@mvolpe: “I think the shorty awards are total crap. Just saying.”
The ultimate winner in the brand category @MarthaVan, who tweets on behalf of Action Wipes, noted that for her “The challenge for a small business such as mine is always getting national publicity. I entered the contest in hopes that the national news would pick up on the awards and thus bring awareness to all the winners.”
For Martha, the time investment in promoting herself and outreaching to her followers for votes was well worth the gamble that winning would actually provide some real business value and lead to additional sales or national visibility for her company. So far, that time hasn’t come.
So much of what is emerging in social media is new and needs to be experimented with, tested and measured to fully understand its ultimate value, so I’m not blaming the Shorty Awards for any of their missteps along the way. I actually give them credit for playing around in this new area, but the true danger comes in when people begin mistaking what they are actually measuring and replace a fun experiment with a new are of technology for something with legitimate value.
2 Comments