Karen O’Brien, Partner, Interactive Services, Crimson Consulting, said something really interesting about trends she’s been seeing with her Fortune 1,000 clients. I share it with you.
We were chatting about social media (a specialty of Karen’s), and she said she is seeing every business unit within companies, as well as every group with a geographical, segment, or product focus within companies, start to consider social media and implement it into their marketing efforts Read more…
MarketingSherpa members got a preview of our 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide last week. An executive summary, table of contents, and some great charts and analysis were released to them in PDF form.
The complete guide will be released the week of Feb. 9. Here are a few interesting nuggets for all of you to contemplate right now. Read more…
The team at HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab recently released a study that analyzes Digg and YouTube submissions to determine the best time of day to post a link to Digg’s social bookmarking site to maximize exposure and popularity.
The complete report contains lots of formulas and charts for analytics experts to chew on. But we saw a quick takeaway for any publisher looking to use the two sites to promote their content, drive traffic or boost search engine visibility:
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When a budget gets cut, experimental marketing dollars are often the first to go. Management cannot afford to dabble in unproven strategies. They want to focus on predictable, reliable tactics.
What a bore, right? You’ve been reading about social networks and viral marketing all year–and now you can’t get the budget to test them. Fear not, help is here.
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The New York Times ran an article this week describing the challenges of advertising on social media sites, Facebook in particular. The article describes Procter & Gamble’s experience with brand advertising on the world’s largest social network and leads the reader to believe that it’s been less than fruitful.
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Even though more B2B marketers consider a role for social media in their marketing strategy, I still hear them express confusion about measuring the impact of creating blogs or participating in social networks. Typical questions:
How do you measure engagement? What’s the value of one Twitter follower? What’s the direct ROI of that blog post you wrote?
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Regularly connecting with clients and customers on social networks can be a lot of work. You have multiple accounts to log into, feeds to watch, messages to respond to, etc. Can it be fun? Sure. Can it be tedious? Absolutely.
I stumbled on a free Web-based tool that helps eliminate some of that tedium. Fuser will take all your messages from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and your email accounts, and put them into one, easy-to-use interface. (Unfortunately, I did not notice LinkedIn as a supported platform)
I just gave the beta service a quick test and it’s definitely fast, easy, and free. Fuser takes your messages–everything from wall posts on Facebook to Tweets on Twitter–and lays them out like emails. You can view and sort all the accounts at once, or select which you’d like to view.
So if you’re struggling to keep up with your business contacts’ online banter, Fuser can help eliminate a few steps. Hopefully it will give you more time to contribute to the conversation.
Teens are using social network sites, video-sharing sites, online games, iPods, and mobile phones. That’s no news flash.
What’s new is a study of 800 interviews with youth and their parents that has shed light on why young people use digital media. Here are the major findings:
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It hadn’t occurred to me that most brands and companies large to small are embracing social media or at least thinking about it. It hadn’t occurred to me until I spoke with Rob Merritt, Senior VP and Director of CKPR, one of the largest independent public relations firms in the U.S.
He said during an interview for a Fame article:
“From a PR standpoint I don’t think we execute a PR program right now that doesn’t have an online component and some kind of social media aspect to it.”
In this case the article was about a campaign his company did for AirTran involving a YouTube contest, stunts, and traditional PR to grab the attention of the college-age demographic.
I know it’s only anecdotal evidence that social media is taking a strong hold. But I can say that based on several interviews I’ve conducted with PR staff at companies and agencies social media is almost always part of the marketing or PR strategies.
And if you want to reach younger generations with your company’s message, it’s almost imperative.
Monitoring Web chatter about your brand can be a challenge. We’ve written at least one article on monitoring social media to protect your reputation. The task can be expensive or time consuming–but it doesn’t have to be.
You can take a quick, free look at what the Web thinks about your brand with HowSociable?. The site is incredibly useful and easy to use. It doesn’t require any registration, usernames or passwords. You can even look at what people are saying about your competition.
Simply type in a phrase and see the number of times it’s mentioned on 22 social media portals. All the biggest players are there–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Technorati, YouTube.
Not only do you get the number of times your brand is mentioned, you also get the links to where your brand is mentioned. That’s so cool! Find out what people across the Web are saying about your company from one spot.
