socialmediaBiz.com - RSS

Ad:tech Panel Urges Deliberate Approach To Social Media

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:37:35 +0000

CLICKZ — Participating in social media can help a brand in many ways, but successful strategies must tie into business objectives, agreed an expert panel at ad:tech New York on Thursday. Many brands are beginning to realize the importance of participating in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but they can get overwhelmed by the noise if they're not careful, according to Pete Blackshaw, EVP of digital services for Nielsen Online...

Dicing Into Facebook Ads

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:33:01 +0000

COMPETE BLOG — If you are an advertiser who wants to drive large volumes of traffic to your site, there are two important things you are probably looking for: reach and ease of implementing your campaign. Facebook meets these qualifications. It is currently the third largest site online with 125MM visitors in September and it is quickly approaching parity with the #1 and #2 publishers, Google and Yahoo...

For Moms, Offline Friends Still Wield Heavy Brand Influence

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:16:46 +0000

ADVERTISING AGE — Technology's influence is widely assumed to have morphed the over-the-fence backyard chat into mommy blogs and Twitter networks. But when moms are seeking product advice, it's not all social-media all the time. A study due out next week from the Parenting Group found that while moms are avid web and social-media users, they still turn to family and friends first, whether by phone, e-mail or in-person, when making decisions about product purchases...

Legit New Games In This Week’s Up And Coming Facebook Apps List

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:30:47 +0000

INSIDE FACEBOOK — There are a few diamonds in the rough mix of simple applications on this week’s list of the top 20 up and coming apps. We put this list together by looking at the applications with between 100,000 and 1 million monthly active users in AppData, sorted by which applications gained the most users in the past week. As this week shows, looking at this segment of apps can show great apps before they become hits...

Branded Virtual Goods Now Fully “Baked”

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:26:38 +0000

IPG EMERGING MEDIALAB BLOG — This week chocolatier Godiva launched a virtual goods based marketing campaign to launch their new "Bakery Shop" selling Godiva Baked Desserts. To introduce the cupcakes, cakes, and gift baskets to consumers, they recruited AdNectar to create branded virtual goods and integrate them into social applications on Facebook—like Birthday Calendar, Willy’s Sweet Shop, and Bumper Sticker...

Nine Things Social Media Can Do

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:04:16 +0000

MARK EVANS TECH — Social media is not a silver bullet or panacea that will magically provide the answers to all of your personal or business needs. Rather, social media can be a valuable and interesting way to augment, enhance and jump-start your communications, marketing and sales efforts. By effectively using some of the tools (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), social media can bolster your strategic and tactical arsenal. In response to B.L. Ochman’s post in AdAge about the 10 things social media can’t do, here’s a quick summary of nine things that social media can do...

Twitter Implemented With Intelligence

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:00:24 +0000

POWER SHIFT — For the last year or so Social Media marketers have been working hard to convince brands that they should be on Twitter. Here’s one from this summer: 5 reasons why brands should be on Twitter. Warren Sukernek reported on a survey from June stating 97% of consumers want brands on Twitter. Are these people wrong, and these surveys misleading? Not exactly. There are many good reasons for brands to be on Twitter and I do believe consumers want to engage brands directly. But in their rush to jump in the pool too many brands have taken a "ready, fire, aim!" approach. Just like any other marketing tool, Twitter needs to be implemented with intelligence. The worst thing isn’t not being on Twitter, it’s being on Twitter poorly. So with that in mind, here are Seven Reasons Your Brand Shouldn’t Be On Twitter...

Three Tips For Social Media Management

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:46:18 +0000

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLORER — I sat across the lunch table talking to Craig Bruenderman and Sam Gracie of ResonantVibes.com yesterday, talking about their community of electronic mix music producers and fans, smiling at what I heard. These are young, tech-oriented entrepreneurs, immersed in all the code and programming most of us fear. They use social tools to build their business around. They’re digital natives. What did they say that made me smile? "How do you choose which social networks and channels to focus on?" I heard the same thing from a small business owner in LaGrange, Ky., last week. I heard it the week before from the brand manager of a major consumer products company and the day before that from a marketing manager for a bank. There are three main focal points you need to concentrate on in order to manage the volume of it all. And they’re not nearly as foreign as you might think...

5 Things A CMO Should Know About Brand Protection

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:43:23 +0000

IMEDIA CONNECTION — CMOs have a lot of irons in the fire. Driving demand, launching products and promotions, gathering market requirements, monitoring the competitive landscape, and optimizing the marketing mix may seem like plenty -- but overlaying each of these responsibilities is our role as guardian of the brand. The advent and growth of the online world has permanently altered these functions, and none quite so much as brand stewardship. In fact, the online world brought a new dimension to traditional brand stewardship, namely brand protection...

How Should Etailers Ask For Customer Reviews?

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:40:34 +0000

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — The fact that having user reviews can be an effective sales driver, providing valuable information for customers is well established, but how do retailers attract reviews onto their product pages? I looked at ways etailers can attract reviews a few months ago. One of those ideas was to email customers after purchase and invite them to leave a review of the product(s) they had bought. A recent report from Snow Valley(pdf) takes a closer look at the issue...

The Changing Mobile Social Ad Space (Q&A)

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:25:07 +0000

EMARKETER — As co-founder and CEO at MocoSpace, Justin Siegel has taken the company from the idea phase to a successful business. He spoke with eMarketer about how the mobile social networking space has evolved and where MocoSpace differentiates itself from some of its larger competitors...

Bettween Makes Tracking And Sharing Twitter Conversations A Breeze

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:21:47 +0000

TECHCRUNCH — With Twitter rolling out its own retweet functionality soon, people will be pointing their followers to more users they may not be engaging with yet, which will spark users to follow more people and hence increase the amount of conversations on Twitter. At least, that’s what I think. But Twitter has never been an ideal two-way conversation tool. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users, particularly when you’re not actually part of the discussion but still interested to know what’s being tweeted. A new tool called Bettween aims to make it easier to visualize conversations between two specific users as well as share them with others...

Consumers More Willing To Share Brand Info On Social Networks Than Previously Thought

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:18:34 +0000

MEDIAPOST — Tweeting the name of a product's brand on Twitter may have become one of those so-called "touchpoints" in the sales funnel that marketers try desperately to capture. It all boils down to where marketers will spend the dollars as they try to allocate budgets for next year. It may help to know that nearly half -- 48% -- of people who saw a brand's name on Twitter went to a search engine to look for the product, compared with 34% on any social network. That's according to a joint study released Thursday by Performics, the marketing arm of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Nerve Center, and ROI Research, an analytics and technology firm...

Max Levchin: Will Virtual Goods Bring Slide Profitability Next Year? (Q&A)

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:12:06 +0000

VENTUREBEAT —Slide, which started in photo-sharing, moved into Facebook widgets and then raised funding at a reported $550 million valuation last year, shifted gears this year and went aggressively into virtual goods. The company’s looking to become a mainstream version of Second Life, where there’s a virtual economy at work of real people buying and selling goods. Instead of churning out new apps like many of its competitors, the company has focused its existing ones -- including seven on Facebook like SuperPoke, Top Friends and FunSpace, with about 27 million users between them. Slide introduced a virtual currency into its SuperPoke! Pets application, where you can raise and care for a virtual pet. You can earn gold through the game or you can purchase 10 pieces of Slide Gold for $1. So is the strategy shift paying off?...

Case Study: The NHL Uses Tweet-Ups To Energize Its Fan Base And Reach New Audiences

socialmediaBiz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:06:51 +0000

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Yesterday we published a case study that I'm really excited about, covering how the NHL used tweet-ups to create excitement for the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs. The league worked with fans to organize a series of events that took place simultaneously around the world on the opening night of the playoffs. I had a chance to attend the tweet-up in Vancouver, and thought they were a great example of the power of both online and offline influence...

Social Media Influencers Are Not Traditional Influencers

socialmediaBiz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:10:24 +0000

PR 2.0 — As more and more brands are moving all of their ad spend online, defining how influence affects their return on investment is necessary and must be done as soon as possible. While some are making inroads to define these calculations many are overlooking the fact that influence affects everything. Without factoring in the real issue of different types of influence you run into a number of problems, for instance focusing on one group of influencers over another or getting broad sweeping numbers instead of knowing exactly how effective your time and money has been spent on the proper target. One thing that usually doesn’t sync up here is that these online influencers with large followings are not the offline influencers...

Wendy’s Piles On The Bacon For New Ad Campaign

socialmediaBiz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:07:19 +0000

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Wendy’s has a new interactive campaign called Real Time based around their Bacon Deluxe burger, and the quick-serve restaurant is relying on Facebook and Twitter users to spread the word about their latest bacon-centric offering. The Facebook part of the ad campaign is accessible from a new “Bacon” tab on the Wendy’s fan page, and offers users a chance to proclaim their love for Bacon in their news feeds...

Chick-fil-A's Cows Graze On Social Media

socialmediaBiz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:05:06 +0000

CLICKZ — Chick-fil-A's recently launched microsite, EatMorChikin.com, is the latest attempt by the restaurant chain to turn its cows -- well-known from TV commercials -- into viral marketing thoroughbreds. Its launch follows the company's successful build-up of one of the biggest Facebook presences in the restaurant niche. After numerous focus groups showed that Chick-fil-A's audience cherished the cow characters about as much as its food, the company decided it was time to ramp-up their presence online, said Michael McCathren, conversation catalyst for the College Park, GA-based brand.

Why Consumers Think Your Brand Doesn't Get It

socialmediaBiz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:48:01 +0000

IMEDIA CONNECTION — "Marketers just don't get it!" was one common phrase at a conference I attended earlier this month. While quips like this may be useful in drawing the attention of those in the audience, few making these claims ever went on to explain exactly what marketers didn't get, nor did they offer up any hypotheses about why marketers may be having such a hard time doing so. Truth is there is simply a huge difference between those that do "get it" and those that do not. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of marketers in the latter camp wandering aimlessly in a multichannel marketing communications landscape that is changing by the day...

Curating, Not Moderating, The Flow Of Content And Participation

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:11:42 +0000

DACHIS GROUP COLLABORATORY — User generated content is, for many media companies and other organisations, more of a problem than a solution. Vague calls to action lead to waves of irrelevant content submitted by audiences who have taken time, effort, and in some instances spent money to do so – only for that content to, in most instances, be ignored. Online communities require moderation to keep discussions on the right side of the law. Breaking stories of importance, or topics that capture the imagination, lead to floods of content that quickly overwhelm processes and technical platforms...

Bebo Games Official Launch: The Next Frontier For Virtual Goods?

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:08:32 +0000

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Bebo Games has officially launched this week, with the company reporting successful numbers for developer and user interest. Bebo Games are offered through several partnerships with game developers, and the top-down approach taken by AOL-owned Bebo means a more uniform game experience for end users. What Bebo has done with its game platform is integrate it with several of its existing features, such as chat, messages and other forms of notifications. This means that users can do things like challenge other users to a game directly from their chat window. It also means that developers have more immediate access to users for the purpose of encouraging them to return to their games...

Nothing Is Viral, But Everything Is Contagious

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:41:24 +0000

ZDNET — It was approaching midnight when the phone rang. Usually, one of two things go through your mind when someone calls that late: “Who died?” or “Do I have enough to make bail?” I was wasn’t so lucky. It was a television show host I was working for, calling from a hotel room somewhere deep in the heart of America. They had an idea. “We’re going to make this campaign go viral! What do you think?” I said the idea was terrible and went to bed. You don’t need to be Miss Cleo to know how the campaign ended; however, there’s an important lesson for those new to social media: How does something really spread? Thankfully, there’s a paint by number formula to answer that...

Socializers: A New Breed Of Online Information Hunters

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:37:34 +0000

THREE MINDS ON DIGITAL MARKETING — 18% of people start their search for new information online via social sites. It's one of those statistics that takes a minute to sink in, and then a whole bevy of new questions rolls out. We don't blink twice when people mention that they start their hunt for new information via search engines, or even portal sites. But is social media really starting to become the primary vehicle for content discovery? The Nielsen study is vague, and had many of us scratching our heads as to what the implications were and whether the stat was over-representative or even under-representative of reality. And...ultimately, WHAT are these people using social media to search for?...

How Facebook Can Be A Revenue Source For Retailers

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:33:05 +0000

EMARKETER — Great stuff here from David Armano on several trends we can expect to see from social media in the coming year. I think it’s interesting that he mentions Best Buy’s Twitter efforts as their main social media play. Twelpforce is definitely a boon to their marketing program, but to me, it’s more of a customer service initiative. Best Buy’s really interesting social media program is their Facebook page...

How Much Do Online Community Managers Earn?

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:28:45 +0000

VATORNEWS — Have you ever wondered what level salary you should pay your social media marketing employee? Or maybe you're curious what you could earn as a community manager within a large corporation? This month, Forum One Networks, an events and research consulting firm, revealed results from its "Online Community and Social Media Compensation Survey." Initiated in July 2009, the purpose of the study was to gather information about the compensation of social media and online community executives, as well as insight into team structures...

How Ford Uses Social Media To Improve Its Brand (Video)

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:24:20 +0000

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — In this interview I talk with Scott Monty -- head of social media for Ford Motor Company -- and the man in charge of Ford’s social media presence and initiatives like TheFordStory.com. When you think of Ford, you might think "old American car company." However, under the direction of Scott Monty, Ford has become one of the leading big businesses in America using social media to connect directly with consumers. And it certainly seems that Ford is on the right track to success, recently reporting 1 billion dollars in profit! In this video, you’ll learn how Ford uses TweetUps to help Ford executives connect with customers across America and how Ford is humanizing its brand. Scott also provides advice to other businesses that are looking to capitalize on social media. Scott also has a little fun, as you’ll see...

Q&A: Zappos' Jane Judd On Customer Loyalty

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:22:10 +0000

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — Zappos has built up a reputation for excellent customer service, and owes much of its success to this. The fact that 75% of its business comes from repeat customers provides convincing evidence of its importance. I've been asking Jane Judd, who is the senio manager of Zappos' Customer Loyalty Team, and was one of the keynote speakers at the recent Internet Retailing conference, about the company's approach...

Amazon Turns Twitter Into A Marketplace - Are You Concerned?

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:15:49 +0000

READWRITEWEB — Last night, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. By clicking on the "Share with Twitter" button from any Amazon product details page, members are delivered to the Twitter.com website. Here, a shortened link and a bit of auto-populated text are automatically filled in Twitter's "What are you doing?" text box. The included text can be edited to say whatever they want before posting or they can choose to just post as is. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program...

Vitrue's FMS Puts Social Media To Work For Larger Brands

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:12:34 +0000

MEDIAPOST — Twitter and Facebook might be little more than toys to some, but for global brands, when used properly, they can provide direct and personal communication with consumers. In the burgeoning field of social relationship management -- what some call the next generation of CRM -- Atlanta-based Vitrue has established itself as a provider of tools to Fortune 1,000 companies, and its latest offering, dubbed FMS, is an effort to both provide effective communication with consumers across platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for these clients, as well as provide scale for larger marketers...

Tragedy Of The Social Gaming Commons: A Blueprint For Change

socialmediaBiz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:09:21 +0000

TECHCRUNCH — In an efficient ad marketplace, the top keyword usually goes to whoever can spend the most money on it, normalized for conversion. Who can afford to spend the most money? Unfortunately, it’s not always the company with the best product, service, or price; under pure laissez faire advertising, it can be the company that tricks, lies, and steals more pennies out of each customer than any competitor. This often forces ethical competitors to make a very tough choice: roll over and stagnate (or die), or play a similar game. Playing to win means staying microscopically behind the red line or breaking the rules and not getting caught. Let’s keep that as the backdrop as I tell a sordid story about lead generation on the Internet...