Social Media Path

The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media for Business.

Jeff Marmins — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:51:06 +0000

Great infographic from David Steel:

This Week’s 10 Most Explosive Facebook Pages (from AllFacebook.com)

Jeff Marmins — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:38:42 +0000

A new week brings a new roundup of Facebook pages that have show awesome growth in popularity. The pages this week seem to be themed around music, saving you a couple bucks, and some good treats . Use our Facebook Statistics Tools to check out all the top pages and applications on the site. Check out the pages below!

Groupon

1 of 10

Groupon had an impressive week as they picked up about 165,000 new followers. The page features new affordable ways to explore the city using exclusive deals, Groupon bucks, contests, and more. Sign up for the page and refer you friends to receive $10. Check out the Chicago-based Groupon’s Facebook page here.

Groupon

Have awkward moments, quirky habits, and pretty general annoyances? LikeWut’s Facebook page puts random relatable thoughts onto its page for discussion. Like the page for constant updates, enjoy the topics (some are pretty funny), and join the discussion about each post. The site picked up over 153,000 new followers last week. Become a fan of LikeWut.

LikeWut

Levi’s Facebook page features videos, pictures, and keep an eye out for exclusive deals. Keep up with the page to stay on top of latest fashions from the company. Levi’s gained over 117,000 new followers last week.

Levi’s

Comedy Central’s Futurama has had an excellent comeback this season on the network, and the show’s Facebook page continues to grow in popularity. The page includes previews of upcoming episodes and also gather to discuss and share your opinion on other episodes of the show. The season finale of the show is this week, and the page has had a steady rise in popularity over the month. This week Futurama accrued up another 106,800 new fans.

Futurama

Keep up with the latest Black Eyed Peas tour dates, appearances, contests, and more on the band’s Facebook page. The page also includes music and pictures from the road. The Black Eyed Peas picked up over 90,000 new fans last week.

Black Eyed Peas

With the weekend drama overseas at the annual Reading and Leeds Festivals, Gun N’ Roses still had managed to have an impressive week on Facebook picking up about 86,000 new fans. Keep up with the page for music, news, and maybe you will be lucky enough to get an estimated time of arrival from band for all upcoming Guns N’ Roses concerts.

Guns N’ Roses

Pepsi is currently giving away grants each month to various projects and ideas based on your votes. Check out the Grant projects on Pepsi’s Facebook page. The page also includes many other interesting tabs, videos, chats, and news about the company’s various products, projects, and promotions. Pepsi gained 82,000 fans this week.

Pepsi

The hype is building for new episodes of the most popular shows on television to return. CSI: Miami premieres in a little over a month, and has been getting more and more popular by the week on Facebook. 79,000 people became fans of the show this past week. Keep up with news about the shows, sneak peaks at the upcoming episodes, and more on CSI: Miami’s Facebook page.

CSI: Miami

Keeping up with Kim Kardashian is even easier on Facebook than watching her family’s television show. Not actually sure why you want to, but almost 79,000 new fans seem to prove me wrong. You can keep up with every move the star makes on her Facebook page. The page includes all her latest news, fashion tips, and more.

Kim Kardashian

About 75,700 new fans on Facebook are ogling McDonald’s various menu items. The page includes various downloads, an interesting tab selections including a McDonald’s locator, and more. Become a fan of here.

McDonald’s

via allfacebook.com

All Facebook, The Unofficial Facebook Resource, is a favorite site – especially when they contribute to our library of real case examples. We’re constantly on the lookout for what’s working and why it works.

The New Small Business On-Ramp to Social CRM

Jeff Marmins — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:15:30 +0000

The New Small Business On-Ramp to Social CRM

There’s one company that looks to be creating a platform small businesses can use to turn a variety of online interactions into stronger customer relationships — and it’s not even a CRM company, in the traditional sense. It’s Google.

By Brent Leary | Aug 16, 2010

Suggested Links

How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business

An Archiving Service for Google Apps

The Other Google

Cloud Computing: Freedom to Be Productive

Tech Talk: Ad Agency Migrates to Web App

Over the past 12-18 months, major customer relationship management (CRM) players like Salesforce.com, Sage, SAP and others have been adding “social” abilities to traditional CRM applications — like viewing social profile information from Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, newer services such as BatchBook, BantamLive, and others are creating CRM applications on a social foundation aimed at the small and mid-sized business market. And with every passing day, social technologies are merging with traditional CRM functionality, giving companies more efficient ways of transforming clicks into valuable customer relationships.

A little over two years ago I wrote about the Three A’s of Social CRM. Back then most people were focused on social media, but not so much on its impact on customer relationship management tools and strategies. Even a year ago when I compared traditional CRM with Social CRM the interest was pretty much limited to industry insiders. That’s not the case today, as the topic of Social CRM has become the focus of many in business.

Having focused on CRM for almost two decades — as an application developer, early Salesforce.com certified implementation partner, and finally as an industry watcher — this may be the most important development I’ve seen. I say this because technology has amplified the voice of the customer, and given them greater control over who they engage with, when they do, and how they do so. This in turn is forcing those charged with engaging them to change their approach: in order to connect with customers who Tweet to thousands of followers, watch videos on mobile phones, and form their own online communities. This also is forcing CRM vendors to provide services that do more than just store customer information and track activities.

But there’s one company that looks to be creating a platform small businesses can use to turn a variety of online interactions into stronger customer relationships — and it’s not even a CRM company, in the traditional sense.

Keeping with the AAA theme from a couple of years back, below are a few reasons why Google is becoming the onramp to Social CRM success for small and mid-sized businesses.

Apps — Internal

Even with Facebook hitting the 500 million member mark — with billions of interactions taking place weekly — the majority of people in business-to-business (B2B) organizations I’ve come across say no more than 15-20 percent of their total interactions on Facebook are business related. Conversely, about 80-90 percent of e-mail interactions these same folks have are business related, and with much higher frequency. And in many cases, the e-mail exchanges are more intimate in nature, from a business perspective. This may be because the conversations are more direct and focused, and the people engaged in the conversations are more focused on each other — not the overall community — during these interaction. So even today, a large percentage of customer relationship building takes place in our inboxes.

Just as Microsoft Outlook was (and still is) key to increasing CRM user adoption over the past decade, Gmail is looking to be that key in the Social Age. More small companies are using Google’s low-cost e-mail hosting services — making Gmail the fastest growing of the big online e-mail providers, closing in on 180 million accounts.

But the choice to use Gmail goes well beyond price. Google has turned the inbox into a relationship-building platform enabling multiple points of contact, and increased opportunities for meaningful interactions. When you exchange e-mails with other Gmail users, Google can (based on your security settings) connect you with them if you both use Google Reader — giving you the ability to see what kind of information they are interested in, and start feeding them more of it. And when you go to YouTube, Google lists the YouTube channels of those you interact with via Gmail at the top of the page — giving you a chance to subscribe to them.

So Google is building an interaction-based platform on the bedrock of Gmail. And as you exchange emails, you can grow the relationship wider by engaging across apps like Reader and Youtube. You can also deepen the engagement with real-time collaborative interactions via Google Docs, Sheets and Sites.

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via inc.com

Social Networks: America’s Largest Companies

Jeff Marmins — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:22:10 +0000

Jolie O’dell at Mashable published an article with some interesting findings from NetProspex about how employees of larger companies are using social media. LinkedIn is still the professional connection point for employees of larger companies:

Hootsuite Recommendation for Social Business

Jeff Marmins — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:40:50 +0000

There are a number of good utilities available for managing multiple social media and social networking properties like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Hootsuite has become our recommendation and the tool we are implementing for clients. Here are some of our main reasons:

Multiple accounts: Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles and Facebook pages. It allows posting to one, many or all accounts at the same time. You can also organize tabs and columns to group accounts by personal preference.
Browser integration: We recommend Mozilla Firefox and Hootsuite has an add-in that is required for our clients to make sharing information and scheduling tweets and post in advance an easy task.team members
Metrics: skip the url shortener, Hootsuite does it for you but adds tracking for each link
Security/User control: Multiple users can log-in to Hootsuite and have privileges to the same account without access to the primary user-name and password. this is a deal-maker for any entity that wants to spread responsibility for social accounts across more than one person.

We had been using Ping.fm for some applications such as mobile updates and embedded gadgets in igoogle home pages as a dashboard for small business users. Note: this is still useful of you are updating your status or posting to a lot more sites than just “Primary accounts” like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Over the past six months or so we have tested a variety of applications like:
Co-tweet
Tweetdeck
Seesmic
Twhirl

All have powerful features however Hootsuite has the best current offer for business. Recently reviewed by Jennifer Leggio in the ZDNet article, “CoTweet vs. HootSuite: Battle of the business Twitter apps,” Hootsuite came out on top.

8.5 Slang Expressions for Business Professionals to Avoid

Jeff Marmins — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:53:24 +0000

We have been gathering a list of negative (as well as positive) behaviors for a class we intend to launch entitled, “Twitter: Business Ethics and Behavior.” Our original intent was an exercise around how to sell without being obnoxious, how to build authentic relationships and having a following that matters. It should come as no surprise that our focus group and crowd-sourced feedback led to the conversation itself. Semantics and syntax were at the core of most people’s impressions.

Social business in public “social media” spaces now requires professionalism. If you are using Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Orkut, Bebo or posting live video on Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler or Justin.tv for business than these are the idioms your audience thinks it’s best to avoid. Keep in mind, your children are going to read this stuff ten years from now when they search for you online.

8.5 Slang Expressions Not to Use in Business

1. That looks dope

2. Dude*

3. Brah, Bro or broddy

4. Mang (as in, “Whas up mang?”)

5. Hollar at me

6. Baller (unless your profession is basketball)

7. Homie

8. Come hang?

8.5 Dog, dawg or my dawgness

*Dude may be used as an expression of extreme excitement, for example, “Dude! Excellent work on that project” – use sparingly unless you really are Jeff Bridges in character.

Social Media Marketing Revolution

Jeff Marmins — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:16:46 +0000

The experience of providing services and training in social media marketing and integrating those efforts into traditional marketing and PR strategy has led us to some concrete observations. Our business is shifting into social business design. Online platforms for community engagement and relationship development now impact every point in sales, marketing and customer service. It will become difficult to segment business functions. Tools will continue to be developed to monitor the real conversation that is happening around business brands and concepts.

The graphic below represents the evolution of marketing. Note: The marketing “pie slice’ could be easily replaced by another business function. The rate of change has reached light-speed.

Social Media Marketing Mashup

All four quadrants represent areas of significant change that must be considered together. The effect can either be social business strategy consideration across business models or newer tools, platforms and tactics will be misapplied in a vacuum. This means business will either ask the questions: “How does this affect our process? Where can we gain efficiency? What has to change?” or it will hire interns or agencies to simply run Twitter and Facebook as if they are merely additions to their battery of marketing vehicles.

I look forward to discussing social business design and social business strategy, particularly in the business-to-business environment in future posts, but I thought I’d offer a simple real life example:

Social networks are forging relationships and allowing groups to form ad hoc around products and issues. This can be as simple as two people talking about seeing a new movie via twitter and fourteen (14) people end up seeing a movie together. They all check-in on Foursquare and learn there are 3 other friends at the movie. Now 17 people divide into two groups and go out for dinner after the movie based on Yelp reviews found on their mobile phones. Relationships are deepened. Behavior is openly shared and public sentiment spreads rapidly.

Social Media Business Tip: Know Keyboard Shortcuts

Jeff Marmins — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:40:31 +0000

Something I learned about being proficient on a computer, as simple as it sounds, is not being “mouse-dependent.”

Here’s a secret (sort of). The software you use to manage social properties is your browser. Irregardless of hardware platform, social media, blogging and online research are easier and faster if you:

Use your keyboard in addition to your mouse
Know and use the right-mouse button
Understand and take advantage of your browser
Group your online activities by bookmark folder and browser window

I’ll discuss #s 2 – 4 in a future post. Let’s make you a bit faster with keyboard shortcuts for now

Do you use your mouse for everything besides typing? Here are some steps to being more proficient:

Print out (yes, on paper) the keyboard shortcuts for your Web browser (especially if you do social media for business). I also recommend printing the keyboard shortcuts for your operating system. Post them near your desk, and/or copy them onto your computer desktop. Look them over twice a day for a month. You’ll get faster as you memorize each keyboard shortcut. Do this for your mobile device too!

Here are some links to most of them: Note: these can be found in most browsers and operating systems by looking under the Help menu or pressing F1 on your keyboard.

Social Strategy: Know your target audience

Jeff Marmins — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:09:01 +0000

Thanks to Forrester Research for developing this tool to determine the mix of your perspective audience in social media. It’s based on Forrester’s Social Technographics® consumer classification model.

Social Media Path subscribes to this model as a tool for understanding your target audience. Our business is based on building social strategy by first examining customer behavior. The result is clear expectations and better customer relationships.

Features of this profile:

For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides) or read Chapter 3 of Groundswell
Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.
The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which Forrester survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Social Media ROI

Jeff Marmins — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:11:37 +0000

Despite our company name, I’ve never been a fan of the “Social Media” idiom. It implies that we are engaged in something new. What has changed is the platform of delivery (now two-way and relatively constant), the rate that word-of-mouth can travel and the ways that effectiveness may or may not be able to be directly measured.

The phrase “Socialnomics” fell into the same marketing-twist-semantic-massage bucket for me. Well, in deference to my Dublin, Ireland colleagues at Simply Zesty, I’m embracing the term. After all, the depth of impact in how marketing, sales, service and product quality must reinvent and perform is economically revolutionary. Simply Zesty produced this video. It’s a hot, energetic bundle of evidence:

Social Media Path

The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media for Business.

This Week’s 10 Most Explosive Facebook Pages (from AllFacebook.com)

Groupon

LikeWut

Levi’s

Futurama

Black Eyed Peas

Guns N’ Roses

Pepsi

CSI: Miami

Kim Kardashian

McDonald’s

The New Small Business On-Ramp to Social CRM

The New Small Business On-Ramp to Social CRM

Suggested Links

Social Networks: America’s Largest Companies

Hootsuite Recommendation for Social Business

8.5 Slang Expressions for Business Professionals to Avoid

8.5 Slang Expressions Not to Use in Business

1. That looks dope

2. Dude*

3. Brah, Bro or broddy

4. Mang (as in, “Whas up mang?”)

5. Hollar at me

6. Baller (unless your profession is basketball)

7. Homie

8. Come hang?

8.5 Dog, dawg or my dawgness

Social Media Marketing Revolution

Social Media Business Tip: Know Keyboard Shortcuts

Operating Systems:

Internet Browsers:

Mobile Handheld Devices:

Google Tools

Social Strategy: Know your target audience

Social Media ROI