Social Media
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
If you want a glimpse at what a media outlet might look like in the future take a look at how Dare’s Mike Litman has developed his blog. Using a similar model to Newser he’s curating content from around the social, marketing and PR web and presenting it in a highly visual format. And it’s working – he’s broken into the top 150 in the AdAge ranking of marketing blogs.
In Mike’s own words:
“Traffic in raw terms dipped a little in the first month since I changed things around a bit but its normalising again (up 90% in the past month). Time spent on site per person and social engagement per post is all up considerably.”
“Postrank reports that 72% of all site engagement now happens via Twitter, with Delicious accounting for a further 14%, and FriendFeed 2%. It’s a reflection of the far reaching, multi platform age.”
“I’ve noticed that trend over the past year where tweeting is the new blog commenting. Its blog commenting for the time poor but at the same time its more social. I always find commenting on blogs to be a closed experience so it seems to make sense.”
Thanks!
Tags: curation, Dare, Lifestream, Tech, Wadds
Posted in Personal Branding, Social Media, Tech, Trends No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
A link I picked up on got Gizmodo’d. It was rather lovely.
I had to turn off the iPhone app Boxcar because of all the @replies coming through after @gizmodo tweeted it and linked to it in their blog post.
Tags: Creativity, CV, Gizmodo, google maps
Posted in Cool, Creativity, Social Media, Trends No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
Tags: committed, community, connected, conversion, core, crowd, engagement, increase action, rick warren
Posted in Cool, Creativity, Infographic, Social Media No Comments »
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.
The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.
Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.
1) Target by occupation
Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes.
However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.
Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.
2) Target by bio
In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.
Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.
3) Target by location
Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters.
But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.
4) New sign ups
Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends!
5) Keep up on your industry
Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.
6) Competitive eavesdropping
Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.
7) Trending photos
Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search).
There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it?
John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.
Via Open Forum
Tags: duct tape marketing, guide, john jantsch, online marketing, Twitter, Useful
Posted in Goodies, Social Media, Twitter, Useful 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Tags: Advertising, advice, Digital Marketing, presentation, slideshare
Posted in Advertising, Cool, Digital, Goodies, Social Media, Useful No Comments »
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
* 133,000,000 million blogs
* 35% of Journalists are now Bloggers
* 48% of Bloggers are in the US
* 66% of bloggers are males
* 1/4 earn $100k+ a year
* Aside from “personal musings”, technology bloggers are the most prominent
* 75% of bloggers are college graduates
Tags: blogging, blogosphere, Infographic, Social Media, stats
Posted in Infographic, Social Media No Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. In the age that we live in today, privacy is dead. The more we share, the richer the picture people can build up about us.
We live in an always on, entirely open, information rich, platform agnostic super high way of facts, however trivial or indeed factual.
This won’t be the case for everyone and will differ wildly for industries/disciplines (my brother, the accountant is probably one of the exceptions) but for the bunch of us living the dream in this whole online pr/ digital advertising / social media type life..
We can see where they are on Foursquare, who they are with on tagged photos on Facebook, what they had for lunch on Twitter (yawn), who they work for on LinkedIn, what music they listen to on MySpace, Spotify or Last.fm, what videos they watch on YouTube and find out about a friends purchases on Blippy.
This is all public information. We are openly allowing the dissemination of this information out there in to the ether. And this somewhat frightening thought doesn’t bother me at all. Should it?
But what brought this thinking along was when my boss @helenium and her boss @ewarwoowar added me as a friend on Facebook yesterday. Facebook is a funny one because I didn’t accept my mother as a friend. I want some private space somewhere on the Internet! So this did bother me for a short while, I’ll be honest. The one place I can allow myself some privacy on was being infiltrated. But then I thought what have I got to worry about and accepted. Self censorship is all the rage these days.
The crux of my argument (to myself) rested on the fact that if i didn’t accept their friend request I would obviously have something to hide and they wouldn’t be able to trust me. So in that respect, privacy is dead and the levels of transparency proffered is directly linked to trust. Because I’d have something to hide if I didn’t open my profile up to them. I don’t have anything to hide bar from some unsavoury drunken pictures when out and about but that’s me outside of work, it’s a different story entirely. And that I believe is respected with a really good work life balance at Dare. I think they kinda want you to have a personality and a life rather than the other way around.
We’ve seen that there are cases that this data can be used to show that we need to be wary what exactly it is we’re telling everyone, pleaserobme.com is a perfect example. It’s fine to check in to a bar but if you A) give out your home address and B) check in and out of it, someone can know when you’ve left home for work in the morning and be lying in wait. A sinister and terrifying thought but one that is valid nonetheless. Don’t get me started on checking in to tube stations..
If you are googling someone who you just want to find out a bit more about and nothing comes up, wouldn’t you be more concerned than seeing a few drunken photos of them on a weekend? I know what I think. Being private is now being hidden. Privacy is dead.
So what does this all mean and where are we heading?
Well, social media has opened us up to the world. For better or worse we now know or have the ability to know the very last minute detail about the people we work with and the same applies for people we might be hiring. We’d probably check them out online before even the first interview takes place and know quite personal facts about them before that very first hello.
Fascinating.
An example: A friend told me recently about someone they were looking at hiring, so a couple of weeks before the initial interview was pencilled in they started keeping more of an eye on their online profiles. Over time, the friend said that they felt that they had built an accurate enough picture of the individual by how they talk and carry themselves with others online that they didn’t pursue employment with the individual. Again, fascinating, but this time a pitfall of being openly transparent.
Again, fascinating, but this time a pitfall of being openly transparent. Being more open is good but be careful.
I could go on. But I won’t.
Trust is linked to Transparency. Discuss.
Tags: social, transparency, Trust
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Tags: Business, future, predictions, Razorfish, Social Media, technology
Posted in Cool, Social Media, Tech, Useful No Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
Tags: digital advertising, Goodies, Marci Ikeler, presentation, Trends, Useful
Posted in Advertising, Cool, Goodies, Social Media, Useful No Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
This is a repost from Adam Singer. Top stuff. Agencies running pages on behalf of brands take note.
Visualization of a Facebook fan page I created for a brand eclipsing 6-figure fans between April-May in 2009 (it has since grown to +700,000 fans).
Platform-specific communities can be a challenge to grow. It’s daunting because you’re probably already growing a voice for your brand on something like a self-hosted blog. But if you can spark rapid growth in a network external of your own, it can be a consistent organic referral source to the places you’re really interested in funneling traffic. Essentially, it’s a valuable outpost.
Let’s first look at some of the results of this page — then get into how it’s possible for you to do the same.
Before I share anything else, I do want to say Facebook fan page analytics leave much to be desired. They allow you to see:
- Total fans/basic subscriber data
- Growth daily
- % male/female
- Age range
- Top cities/top countries/top languages
- Basic interaction/engagement metrics
- Pageviews
I cut off the data as it just lists more top countries/cities/languages and I only want to share a sample of what you see as overview data. But it’s disappointing because you can’t really drill down to see more specific trends in data of the fans of pages. It’s almost no different than basic web analytics with a few extras like age. The age range is interesting, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why not show me more detailed buckets based on profile information such as education level, profession, etc. With groups this large there would be some interesting trends to see that wouldn’t be difficult for Facebook to display. Clearly they don’t want us knowing that much.
Interactions per post (likes, shares, comments) range from 12 to more than 1,300 – at this scale every image, post, video or link gets at least 100 likes/comments/shares.
Organic growth is consistently strong – with most days seeing around 500 or more new fans.
This brand is off and running – I have not been involved their community building since May, 2009. But you can see by the daily growth of more than 1,000 new fans, they already have attained the critical mass necessary to sustain organic growth daily without necessarily doing anything. Although they have started to also see some fan attrition in September (I took a look at the situation and they could actually do something to stop this if they wanted).
So how can you spark rapid growth on your Facebook fan page?
1. Spark initial growth numbers within the network quickly
If you’re looking to reach a wide audience, (this brand has mass appeal) reaching enough active users in the network to reach a tipping point is the first, crucial step. There are just more potential people to share/like/comment on your content you’re adding into the channel (which in Facebook helps grow a fan page due to the fact this activity shows up in user feeds).
An easy way to start is get multiple influential users to invite all of their friends to become fans of the page. If you can get 20 people each to invite 100 users, and encourage those users to invite their own friends, you’ll start to see growth. Use incentives if necessary – contests, rewards for joining, etc. Facebook has specific rules now (which weren’t in place when I made this page) that make some of this more difficult, but there are still plenty of creative ways to do this.
2. Leverage external traffic streams/subscriber bases
Take stock of all your communities, email lists, websites and any other place you have a digital presence. Start to call them to action to join your fan page. Add links to your blog sidebar, put a CTA on the homepage of the website you’re already marketing, add a link in employee emails, put links in your email marketing, etc. Put it bold and up front to start – the key is to funnel enough subscribers to the page where a natural cycle of growth begins by virtue of more people becoming fans. The strategy here is simple: leverage what you have to spark growth in a new community until it’s growing organically.
But remember: the long-term play is to consistently siphon people out of Facebook to a community where SEO/social media value can really ramp up and you’re not limited by the rules of playing in a network you don’t control. In other words: once your fan page is growing organically, flip the funnel: start to move people out of Facebook to your own, self-hosted platform like a blog or more valuable area than inside the walled garden. Users are going to be more valuable if you can get them to a place where it’s all signal and no noise (Facebook’s signal to noise ratio is terrible).
3. Continually update the page with new content
More content on the page is going to be more content for users to interact with. And, due to how Facebook has setup their system, users consistently engaging with content is a key component to growth. By reaching into the streams of individual users your brand can start to grow fast if your content is worth reacting to.
Other ideas:
- Buy targeted advertising on Facebook’s platform
- Leverage your offline networks (TV/newspaper/magazine ads, etc.)
- Run a contest/promotion offline of Facebook, yet encourage users to become a fan during the promotion process (since there is quite a bit of red tape to actually run promotions on Facebook fan pages themselves)
- Create some unmissable content published exclusively on your Facebook fan page
- Frequently make special offer announcements and even new product announcements through the page first
- Hire a community manager to implement ongoing growth opportunities across all your social channels
- Buy Google ads to drive traffic directly to your Facebook fan page
- End your press releases with your Facebook fan page link
- Provide talking points to publicized team members to say become a fan in Facebook during interviews
Of course, there are plenty of additional methods for growing Facebook fan pages/platform specific pages. But any additional recommendations or ideas are going to be more specific based on the brand or product involved (the above are all quite general). To grow the above page to 6 figures plus, we did some creative/buzzworthy ideas too – but you’ll have to come up with those yourself.
The bigger thing to remember is know how you’re going to make your Facebook presence work for your larger digital strategy prior to doing anything. Without this, sure – you can grow something popular, but it should still feed a larger objective.
Tags: Adam Singer, Analytics, brands, facebook, Facebook Fan Page, Metrics, Numbers
Posted in Case Studies, Social Media, Useful No Comments »
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Word seems to have made its way around then. Way cool.
Tags: Dare, Digital, new media age, NMA
Posted in Advertising, Digital, Social Media No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Very clever.
Tags: Cool, CV, Infographic, innovative, Jordan Carroll, Resume
Posted in Cool, Infographic, Jobs, Social Media No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Proving that blog comments can be just as invaluable as they are insipid, Chicagoist scribe Kevin Robertson unearthed a potentially nefarious Wal-Mart plot in his hometown. After a certain commenter by the name of “Chatham” began regularly taking issue with Wal-Mart opponents on various Robertson posts about the brand’s attempt to enter the Chicago retail market, the author decided to take a closer look at who this character was.
Robertson traced the URL attached to Chatham’s comments back to a community group called “Our Community, Our Choice”, which seemed to sincerely support a Wal-Mart opening in the area. On the bottom of their site, the group states that it’s “proudly supported by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce”, which Wal-Mart happens to be a member of. Robertson also traced the IP address on Chatham’s comments back to Serafin and Associates, a Chicago consulting firm that Wal-Mart retained to manage its Chicago PR.
After doing a little digging and getting nowhere with Wal-Mart flack, Robertson finally interviewed Chicagoland’s Government Relations Director Michael Mini. While admitting that Serafin was involved in strategy sessions and that “Our Community, Our Choice” was “part of our advocacy effort to gain support”, Mini was basically struggling for words when asked if he knew Serafin’s IP address was being used to comment on blogs. In fact, the guy couldn’t even give a straight answer as to whether or not he was actually from Chicago.
Robertson says:
“While Wal-Mart certainly has the right make its case to Chicago, the way they’ve gone about this – creating a fake community group that purports to represent a community’s residents and interests – is sneaky and underhanded. If what they have to offer Chicago is such a great deal, why did they need to go through the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce to set up a bogus grassroots group?”
This is all technically speculation since Wal-Mart hasn’t come forth to cop to any such travshamockery, but should we be so shocked if it is 100% true?
Words fail me. “Amazing” like @whatleydude rightly says.
Tags: advocacy, chicago, fake community, transparency, wal-mart, Walmart
Posted in Retail, Social Media No Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
So there you go, I’ve said what I wanted to say for a reasonably long time now, I’m joining Dare. For anyone that knows me, a secret like that is hard to keep. As the ever wise Tom Fishburne shows above, we don’t always know entirely what we’re letting ourselves in for but isn’t that exciting. There’s obviously the fear of the unknown, the change of surroundings and the new people, but leaps of faith have to be taken to move forward, to better myself, to keep me on my toes and to take myself out of my comfort zone. I’ve had a fantastic time with my boss @pbizzle, so this was a tough decision but nonetheless the decision has been made.
Tom describes the image like so:
Most careers are not rung-by-rung linear paths. Instead, they involve a series of flying leaps, not knowing whether those leaps will take you up, down, or sideways. Or if you’ll miss the trapeze altogether. Or if there’s even a net.
It takes courage to take each leap. And patience when you’re not headed the direction you’d like.It takes courage to take each leap.
Thinking about your career in purely a linear way focuses you on all the wrong things and blinds you to the actual experiences along the way. Worst of all, it can make you risk-adverse.
It’s much easier to stand still and be happy where you are and doing what you’re doing. Hey, I am happy where I am and doing what I’m doing. But i’ve always wanted to be constantly developing, being adaptable, taking risks, moving onwards and upwards and making my own destiny. And I guess you only do that by taking leaps of faith.
Risks sometimes don’t pay off. That’s why they are risks.
‘To expose to a chance of loss or damage; hazard’
Here’s one example: The first ‘proper’ job out of Uni that I took didn’t work out. I naively accepted it while I was still at Uni thinking I was clever not to have to worry about months of job hunting. In hindsight I didn’t give myself the time to appraise whether it was the right thing to do. I had a week time difference from finishing Uni to starting work. Within months of starting I was desperately unhappy and found myself questioning what it was I wanted to do, where I wanted to go and how I was going to get there. I’d studied a Marketing degree for 4 years at University which lent itself to the job I was in, within the Marketing team of a large retailer, where I was told that jobs didn’t exist to do with social media. I disagreed. When 4 months later I had quit, I wondered if what I’d studied for my degree was completely useless. Of course it wasn’t but at the time I thought differently.
Licking my wounds I moved to London without a job, just before the economy imploded. Everyone asked me what I was smoking. My parents said I needed to stick at it. But I knew it wasn’t right. It didn’t *feel* right. So I trusted my instinct and took a risk. To thrust myself in to uncertainty in the country’s capital. Even though the job didn’t work out, the life lessons it taught me were invaluable and accelerated my thought processes to get me to where I am now, I firmly believe that.
After a short and highly enjoyable stint at Splendid, working with some inspirational people, I joined the fold at Consolidated PR where I’ve been involved with some brilliant projects, which Paul mentions here in the inaugural company blog post over at Thatsgreatand.com
I’ll paraphrase the post:
In the last twelve months we’ve set up our digital and social media stall here in the Covent Garden office, commenced an agency-wide social media education and training programme and started integrating social media activity into project and retained campaigns for clients in both London and Edinburgh. In this short space of time we’ve delivered digital and social media work for a whole range of brands and organisations – MTV, several parts of the Scottish Government, The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, learndirect and Mishcon de Reya just to name a few. On top of that we’ve got lots more exciting work on the boil with a number of other clients, and an appetite for more in 2010.
So as is evident, in a year we’ve made great progress.
However, I’ve always held a great curiosity and interest in adland. Paul gave me stick for having a subscription to Campaign magazine. But I always felt at some point I’d move in to it. Don’t ask me why, it was just one of those fate type things I felt would happen. Which leads me wonderfully to my next leap of faith. Dare, the digital agency of the decade.
I’m excited about the new challenge, settling in to the role of Social Media Planner and mixing it up with the web trendies.
Let’s hope it’s an upwards leap on the career trapeze. Wish me luck!
Tags: @pbizzle, Campaign magazine, Career ladder, Consolidated PR, Covent Garden, Dare, Jobs, Paul Borge, risks, Social Media Planner, Splendid Comms, Tom Fishburne, Trapeze act
Posted in Advertising, Digital, Jobs, Planning, Site News, Social Media 17 Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Tags: @hrhmedia, digital media, Hanson Hosein, presentation, repression of communication, story telling, Useful
Posted in Digital, Goodies, Social Media, Useful 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Who says YouTube videos are for the uncultured? YouTube enthusiasts can raise their nose with the best of them with “Without You, Baby, There Ain’t No Us,” the cool, cultured art project by Comenius Roethlisberger and Armir Jahic that took popular video clips and immortalized them in colored-pencil drawings. The exhibit covers hundreds of YouTube frames, among them our favorite and most memorable. For diehards, the prints are apparently for sale.
Tags: art, Cool, youtube
Posted in Cool, Social Media No Comments »
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.
If the content has high value then not only will the recipient be more likely to engage with it, but they will be more likely to engage in conversation with the brand, compelling them to pass-along the content to their friends because it has social currency.
I have identified 5 core types of social currency value; Useful, Entertainment, Monetary, Information and Personal.
Before giving some explanation and examples for each area, it is worth pointing out that they are all channel agnostic, so for example ‘events’ are particularly suited for entertainment. In fact, an event like Barcardi’s B-Live can in itself provide a rich stream of social currency for the digital channel e.g. twitter announcements, flickr photostreams and YouTube channels.
1) Useful value is more commonly referred to as brand utilities, so although Nike+ is held up as the ‘daddy’ of brand utilities, there are also a huge numbers of mobile apps that would qualify for this category.
2) Entertainment value is more commonly referred to as branded entertainment and it’s interesting to note that typically this is the approach that an ad campaign concept would take. The ultimate proof of social currency is when your content is being remix ed and parodied, as happened with the Cadbury’s gorilla campaign.
3) Monetary value is the social equivalent of the conventional sales promotion or PR activity. So it could be a simple voucher like the infamous Threshers’ discount voucher or a competition run in conjunction with an influential blogger.
4) Information value, in the form of knowledge and thought leadership, can be produced in various formats e.g. video interviews, slideshare presentations and blog posts (like this one
. More superficial forms of information, like gossip and conspiracy, can also be adopted.
5) Personal value is a particularly interesting currency, as it often provides social currency that is extremely compelling. The global success of reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, and the talent shows such as Pop Idol and X-Factor demonstrate the importance of fame.
As the above Venn diagram suggests, there are opportunities to blend various currencies together and if done correctly, produce in a more potent piece of currency. An example of this would be a game (entertainment) which has a leaderboard (fame).
It is possible to capitalise on social currency that has already gained momentum by adopting the concept in your campaign – maybe we should call this meme-riding? T-mobile did this very successfully when they rode the flash-mobbing meme with their ‘Dance’ campaign.
Key to successfully producing high-value social currency is setting out with the right mind-set at the planning stage and get the right multi-disciplined team together to work on the social currency idea.
Brilliant venn diagram and equally great write up by Steve Sponder.
Tags: entertainment, information, monetary, personal, social currency, steve sponder, Useful, venn diagram
Posted in Digital, Social Media 4 Comments »
