Archive for July, 2008
Getting My Arms Around Twitter
I admit it took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. I could not see why anyone was interested in what I was doing right now. I still struggle with the voyeuristic aspects of Twitter but a couple of new applications are helping me overcome my reluctance to using it.
For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about Twitter is a social network that lets you tell your friends what you are doing at any given time. It also lets you see what everyone else is up to. It’s a kind of worldwide bulletin board of tiny messages that form a huge mosaic of everyday activity.
Tags: Twitter
Filed under Social Media Marketing :
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Jul 30th, 2008
B-To-B Blogs Experiencing Turbulence
Ten days of hiking, biking, kayaking, swimming, amusement parks and concerts and I am well rested and somewhat ready to return to work:)
While on vacation I read with interest the editorial in BtoB that Forrester Research is reporting that the number of b-to-b blogs started by corporations fell by nearly half from 2006 to 2007 and that the decline in new launches is expected to continue this year.
Why are corporations starting fewer b-to-b blogs? Because they don’t the concept of what a blog is about. A blog is not a place for only new-product happy talk, recycled press releases and customer success stories. Making this content accessible via an RSS button will not make it viral!
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Jul 28th, 2008
Heading For Vacation
As I head out on vacation to relax and recharge the batteries here are a couple of things that I will be focusing on when I get back.
StumbleUpon: We have a client who is doing very well on StumbleUpon which is driving five figures a month of traffic. I feel that we are only scratching the surface for their site and our focus for the fall will be to make that 6 figures a month..
Filed under Social Media Marketing : Comments (1) : Jul 17th, 2008
How Many Customer Reviews Do You Need?
Consumer reviews play a big part in purchase decisions for online shoppers in the US, according to a June 2008 Opinion Research Corporation study.
As reprted in eMarketer 61% of respondents said they had checked online reviews, blogs and other online customer feedback before buying a new product or service. Of those who looked for reviews and other feedback, more than eight out of 10 said such evaluations had at least some influence on their purchases.
These numbers are basically unchanged from a Deloitte & Touche study that that we blogged about last fall.
Filed under Social Media Marketing : Comments (1) : Jul 14th, 2008
Three Best Social Media Sites For Realtors
During an IM exchange last week we were talking about real estate agents and how social media could help realtors uncover prospective customers. That got me thinking about how I would use social media if I was a real estate agent and what would be the three social media sites I would use.
Disclaimer is that if you are a real estate agent, your first step should be to put up a blog. Once you have an active blog, then you can work on social media sites:)
Site 1: Facebook
Filed under Social Media Marketing : Comments (4) : Jul 8th, 2008
MySpace Numbers Look Strange
I was reading in Advertising Age Cartier, a brand better known for diamond necklaces and $10,000 watches, will advertise its latest collection, Love by Cartier on MySpace,
Now this is not the first time that a luxury brand has hooked up with a social network. Last year I blogged about how Neiman Marcus had picked YouTube as a place to publicize its 100-year anniversary.
What surprised me where comments by Travis Katz, managing director-international operations for MySpace.
Travis was talking abut MySpace demographics and he claimed that:
Tags: MySpace
Filed under Demographics, Social Media Optimization :
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Jul 6th, 2008
Making Content Portable
We have been testing some different videos campaigns and I was struck by how social media optimization has changed how companies view videos. From a nice to have feature on a web site to a strategic portable asset
Video is not a new thing to the web. Pre-social media (say 2 years ago) a lot of sites had video. Characteristics of video pre-social media was:
- Long Videos (20 minutes was not an uncommon size)
- Stick on their own pages (usually pop-up pages with no content)
- Rarely found by search engines or users!
Tags: Facebook, video, youtube
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Jul 2nd, 2008
Downside of Sharing
One of the best things about a blog is that you get to talk about and exchange ideas on what is working and not working in social media. That is good.
The downside is that by sharing you might wake up one morning and find out that the tactics(s) that you have been using successfully no longer work. Either because the search engines manually adjusted your site, or because a lot of people started to use that tactic thus devaluing it.
This is a topic that Aaron Wall at SEObook.com wrote about today and Brent Csutoras wrote a great post on Shoemoney.com recently about over sharing.
Filed under SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Jul 1st, 2008
