Archive for January, 2007
How to Implement a Corporate Social Media Strategy
I came across an interesting podcast interview with Podtech’s director of corporate media strategy, Jeremiah Owyang. Within the interview, Jeremiah outlines his five-step process to integrate corporate marketing strategies into the blogosphere, and methods to develop prospect/customer trust and credibility.
According to Jeremiah, the five steps to implementing a corporate social media strategy are:
- Awareness and Education - Understand the social medium and the different tools that are available like blogs, forums, wikis, podcasts etc.
- Listen to the Marketplace – Social media interaction is on a peer to peer basis, so listen to what people are saying about your company and your competitors. Use tools like Google alerts and Technorati tags to keep up to date with your marketplace.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Jan 31st, 2007
Want To Get Traffic From Social Networks?
There was a discussion on Threadwatch last week about how much traffic that the social networks can drive to a web site and how for the social networks trail only Google in generating traffic to a web site.
What struck me most about the thread was the post by Graywolf (aka Michael Gray). Graywolf introduced his comments by saying that Social Media is not just Digg or Delicious or MySpace. That each social network is different and that once you understand what interests the users on a specific social network that you can will be more successful reaching out to them.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Jan 28th, 2007
Are MySpace Friends a Proxy for Votes?
I find it fascinating to watch how MySpace has become mainstream America. The aging demographics is one thing, but when candidates with presidential aspirations have MySpace pages then you know that MySpace is no longer the domain of the under 17 crowd.
Fully thirteen months before the first primary and already most of the serious presidential candidates have their MySpace site up and running. I thought it would be interesting to look at the number of MySpace friends a candidate has, and see if that popularity carries over the voting preference.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (5) : Jan 24th, 2007
Marketing via YouTube
Last year I blogged about how companies were using sites like YouTube to help recruit new employees. So I was not totally surprised when Karl Long noticed that Nokia has created its own channel on YouTube.
Karl has an interesting quote in his article from Alastair Curtis who is Nokia’s Chief Designer:
“Design is undoubtedly a key, defining issue in our industry. This is only set to increase over the coming years as we see people demanding mobile devices that more closely match their lifestyle.”
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Jan 23rd, 2007
Measuring Social Media Campaigns
One of the questions that came out of the recent Inc. 500 social media study was how can a business measure the success of their social media campaigns? Eric Peterson who writes for Web Analytics Demystified has recently written a series of articles on this topic.
Instead of traditional analytics like visitors and page views, Eric instead measures how “engaged” a visitor is when they come to your site. Eric defines an engaged visitor as:
- Reading my weblog
- Reading other user generated content on the web site
- Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Jan 22nd, 2007
Marketing Politicians via the Internet
Interesting to see that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton decided to follow in the footsteps of John Edwards and Barack Obama in using video and the Internet to announce her candidacy.
Internet TV will play an important role in this upcoming presidential election and I find it interesting that the Clinton campaign is not utilizing YouTube to help galvanize the troops and get her message out. Clinton’s video announcement was made on her web site and I cannot see a copy of it on YouTube while her main rivals Edwards and Obama have pages of YouTube videos.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (6) : Jan 21st, 2007
Interview with Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes
Last week Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research released a detailed study of the adoption and usage of social media by the Inc. 500. There research revealed that social media adoption among the companies is much higher than many predicted and certainly much higher than the Fortune 500.
The information in the study was generated a lot of questions and Eric and Nora were nice enough to take some time to answer a few of my questions.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Jan 16th, 2007
Inc. 500 and the social media revolution
The Center for Marketing Research released the results of a study that study that researches the number of companies in the Inc. 500 that use social media and other forms of new media. Kudos to John Cass who I believe blogged about this study first.
What I found fascinating about the study results was how much media marketing has captured the minds (and marketing efforts) of the Inc. 500. Consider that “Over one quarter of the Inc. 500 studied report social media is very important to their business/marketing strategy”. This is an incredibly high amount for a marketing medium that has become mainstream in less than a year. To put that 25% in perspective, only 19% of the Inc. 500 are currently pursuing any time of blogging strategy.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (7) : Jan 14th, 2007
Gather.com and Borders Team Up
Interesting press release Tuesday from Borders and Gather.com announcing a joint project in which shoppers at Borders can click on to a link to Gather.com and share their thoughts on books, music and other entertainment.
Love the quotes from the two CEO’s:
“The power of social networking and social media is changing the way companies interact with their customers,” Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace said Tuesday in a statement. “Borders is a brand that appeals to highly educated and highly informed adults who are the core of the Gather.com community.”
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (7) : Jan 9th, 2007
Surprise Surprise: Survey Shows Teens Use Social Networks
A new survey release today from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.
Survey Findings
- 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
- 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles.
- 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Jan 8th, 2007
