Wednesday, November 10, 2010
New Facebook Opportunities
1) Photos
Photos are an integral part of Facebook's value. As Facebook continues to upgrade their photo offering and sharing features, there will be more opportunity to expand your brand and engage your customers and advocates. Photos also help bring your companies Facebook page to life. Businesses should not overlook the interaction power and sharing opportunities that photos can create between you and your customers. Video falls into a similar category as photos.
2) Groups
You can read more in this previous article on facebook's new groups in a weekly recap. The new group features allow for live chat, and can be used for business purposes by creating more targeted customer focus groups or event oriented groups. Be aware though, when using groups you must have a definitive strategy regarding who you invite, and the purpose of the conversation.
3) Questions
Facebook Questions is an area that will continue to evolve and shape the boundaries of social search. Businesses can take advantage of Facebook Questions by answering these questions as a business and/or thought leader or expert in that particular field. It is also important to tread carefully with this and use as soft sell approach when asking questions as a marketing or informational tool to your community. It is important to note that all questions are open to everyone and live outside of your community, so this needs to be remembered when asking and answering questions.
4) Places
If your business has a physical store or location, than Facebook places is another utility (Foursquare) that can help increase foot traffic, by encouraging people to check-in. An "I was here" message gets delivered to the friends and posted to the place page. So go claim your page, because Facebook has 500+ million users, which means most the people that come into your business are on Facebook and have a network of friends that you can easily reach out to.
5) Likes
Some consider "likes" and "fans" as the end all, which I disagree with. A smaller but more targeted fan base can be far more effective than a large number of likes by unqualified people. However, having more people that "like" your company or page creates a larger distribution network, and therefore has incredible marketing power. There are many creative ways to drive people to "liking" your company, however the most effective way is to have a strategy and be persistent... which I'll save for another post.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Facebook Pages Update
The red box indicates the new "top level" admin menu as a column on the left hand side with a "help" link at the bottom.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Social3i on the Road
- Monday 11/1, we'll be at the University of Washington, taking part in a panel discussion for the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship's "Entrepreneur Week."
- Wednesday 11/3, we'll be at Williams-Helde Advertising, running a Northwest Entrepreneur Network "eIQ Session" on "Social Media for Startups."
- This weekend, our Sports Division heads to LA to participate in activities around the U.S. soccer community and the 2022 World Cup bid.
- Next Friday, 11/12, we'll be all over the Northwest Entrepreneur Network's "Entrepreneur University" at the Bellevue Hyatt. Xavier will be moderating a panel entitled, "You Get What You Measure" featuring Rand Fishkin, Galen Ward and Kabir Shahani. It should be a great event. (And don't miss Cranium founder Richard Tait, as he takes the stage for a keynote speech about lessons starting his newest project that launched last week.)
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Social Media can Improve your SEO & SEM
Monday, October 25, 2010
Busy Seattle Technology Marketing Week
If you're in technology marketing and advertising, this is going to be a busy week.
Tuesday: Social Media Club October Event "Building Ambassadors Using Social Media" at The Canal in Ballard, 5300 34th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107 (6-9pm)
Wednesday: TechFlash Meetup at Spitfire Grill, 2219 4th Avenue Seattle, WA (5-8pm)
Thursday: NWIAG.com October Event at Havana's Social, 1010 E. Pike St, Seattle, WA 98122. (5-9pm)
See you all there.
Friday, October 22, 2010
The sFund and Space Travel
This week's Headlines in Social Media
The big story of the week is the announcement that Kleiner Perkins, Amazon, Zynga, Facebook, Comcast and others are all betting on Social.
"Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy." -KPCB Partner Bing Gordon
Together these giants launched the 'sFund' this week, which will be a $250 million dollar fund dedicated to funding entrepreneurs and companies delivery social applications and advancing the social web. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg says:
"The Web is being rebuilt around people"It is great to see that companies of this magnitude and are combing their resources to drive further innovation in the "social web". One of the first investments for the fund is "Cafebots" which is in stealth but is being dubbed as a "Friend Relationship Management" service with the goal of helping users make better use of their social graphs. This gives an idea of the next generation of companies that will add value to the social web.
Foursquare
An Astronaut checked into Foursquare from outer Space today which is a first in the realm of outer space social media. It kicks off a partnership between NASA and Foursquare helping to promote other NASA venues that the rest of us may be able to check-in to.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
This Week's Headlines in Social Media
According to a recent study, Social Media is now more popular than email on mobile devices (based on the amount of hours spent daily). The article from Mashable also goes on to state that social media is more popular in rapid growth markets worldwide, and takes up more of their time on PC's than email does. Overall it is just another reminder of the tremendous growth of Social Media worldwide.
Measuring Social Media - Eventbrite's Internal Case Study:
For Eventbrite Social Media = Real Dollars. When someone shares something on their event ticketing site they have been able to break it down to real dollar values. They also go on to state: "The hyper-relevancy of the social graph breeds deeper engagement, greater sales and stickier audiences."
So what is the actual value of the various platforms? According to Eventbrite:
"Our most recent data shows that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ”email friends” application equals $2.34. On an aggregate level across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and our email share tool, each share equals $1.78 in ticket sales. We’re seeing this number improve every week with the most recent four-week average equaling $1.87."
Here is what the social commerce cycle looks like for them:
Keep in mind events are inherently social and are directly engaging their users to an ecommerce transaction, however statistics like these are great to see the value that social media can bring. Eventbrite also states that Facebook has surpassed Google as their #1 site for referring traffic, and that one share on Facebook brings on average of 11 visits back to Eventbrite.
Learn how Eventbrite went about quantifying their data and building this social commerce case study.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Weekly Social Recap
This week Facebook unveiled "Groups" which gives users a place to participate in various activities such as document sharing, chat, photo-tagging and email lists with a select group of friends. Other than the name this is very different than their previous "group" functionality. This was built internally by Facebook with an effort to mirror "real-world" groups, allowing users to control the distribution of their messages, and build them around multiple contexts. Zuckerberg promises, something “so simple that everyone on the site will want to interact with it.”
Here is good demo & overview from Mashables' Ben Parr:
For many of us Twitter's new User Interface or User Experience (UI / UX) was implemented this week. Twitter has been busy rolling out it's redesign over the last few weeks. The redesign integrates multimedia into the stream on "Twitter.com" taking elements from many of the third-party applications available. So far the response has been positive, and likely the redesign will help create stickiness on the "Twitter.com" website versus sending their users elsewhere across the web. This also opens a new world of revenue and advertising opportunities for them.
Interesting uses of Social Media
Staples
Staples is a great example of a big brand using their social media channels in creative ways. They use their Twitter Page for community updates, customer support, and overall feedback. With several writers under various tags (^MO) they have managed to give the brand a personality and even mix in some humor. They have also devised a creative way to create new followers, like donating a dollar to charities of your choice for each new follower.
Staples has also had success with their Facebook Page. They created an app that lets you digitally shred or edit Facebook photos of yourself, they highlight their weekly deals, have a download button for their iphone app, have fun facts about the company, and offer other creative engagement strategies.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Social Media Strategies at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts
Monday, October 4, 2010
Reviewing Paper.li
There are a lot of semi-useless social media tools out there. One that we are liking more and more is Paper.li.
In a nutshell, it takes your Twitter feed, and distills it into a front page of a newspaper, so you can scan all the important topics you care about in one shot. It even splits them into categories like Sports, Media, Politics, Technolgy, etc....
Now, it only grabs feeds from the people you follow, so if you are one of those "uber important" types that only gets followed themselves, then it's not going to be much good. And if you follow a bunch of people that tell you about their sandwich, then you'll have a boring paper.li as well.
Here's part of the Monday morning grab from http://www.paper.li/social3i
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Job Openings - Social Media / Community Leads
- Video production and editing (Non broadcast quality)
- Bi-lingual (Spanish and English) writing skills
- Graphic Design and light Web coding
- Experience driving application downloads
- Mobile marketing campaign experience
- Sports Retail / CPG experience
Monday, September 13, 2010
New Favorite Social Media Tool - Flavors.me
Friday, September 3, 2010
2 Weeks With the iPad
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Social Media Budget Question
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Give up on the idea of a balanced right/left brained marketer!
What is required to be a good social media analyst?
Here is a short list of concepts, credentials, potentials and requirements that I’ve used to build and train Social Media Analysts over the last 2-3 years. If you’re thinking about social media analysis as a profession, I’d recommend checking off all the readings on this page and then building or reflecting these potentialities and capabilities in your resume.
Checklist for a solid SM Analyst
1. Must understand social networks and have a general understanding of the basics of network theory that anyone w/ a life sciences background would have picked up in a university level Biology or O-Chem class.
2. At least 6months to 1 year working as a SEO Marketing tactician (and should have a firm grasp of what drives activity in the long tail)
3. Should be a life-long-student of Psychology or Anthropology and specifically have a high interest in the relationships between digital technology, communication and epistemology.
4. Have some background in User Experience Testing, or Digital Marketing or Online advertising.
5. A high level of curiosity and some of your own well developed insights about the evolving web (mobile, semantic web, augmented reality) and where these are headed over the next 5-10 years.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Love to #mobil, #social, #lbs? - We're hiring
If you are a power user of one or all of the following: Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter and Yelp we want to talk to you!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Cleaning Up vs Starting Over
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Social Marketing Choice - Retainer Based Agency Vs In-House
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
10 Upcoming Posts for Companies Expanding their Social Marketing
So, as we weave our way through the rest of the 3rd quarter, we thought we would practice what we preach, and lay out the roadmap for our primary content. After speaking with clients and potential clients, this list seems to cover most of the questions facing folks who are just starting to own their company's social marketing programs.
Social is no longer a “nice to have” part of your Integrated Marketing Plan. The first important question departments have to ask is whether they have the talent in house, or do they need to outsource community management to an agency. Here are some things to think about, and how a couple of companies have made that decision.
4. Picking a Starting Line for Your Program - The Initial Audit
5. The Training Process
8. Generating Momentum Internally
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Doing more with less... seriously!
Friday, July 16, 2010
Who is Social3i
Monday, July 12, 2010
Mixing Social Marketing Into Your Email Program
The main point may be their quote, "There are real people behind all those email address on your mailing list, and MailChimp's new features will help you get to know them.” Let us know if you are using email programs with similar opportunities to integrate social with email.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
75 million reasons you should be considering mobile marketing programs
- 82% of Pew survey respondents said they owned a mobile phone. That translates into roughly 187 million, out of 228 million US adults overall.
- 38% – 40% of that population goes online from their handsets, or about 75 million people (for 18-29 yr olds that number is 65%)
- 55% of mobile Internet users are online via their mobile phones at least once a day and 43% are access the mobile Internet “several times a day.”
Just for fun - The LeBron Sweepstakes Takes Social Center Stage
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Social Marketing Resources for Businesses
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Join Us Next Week at NWEN's eIQ - Social Media for Start-ups
Next week, we'll be at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, for an event focused on coaching entrepreneurs, authors, small business owners and designers on how to leverage their social marketing presences. We've been asked to cover the following topics, and will likely go a little deeper since this crowd is generally pretty advanced.
• The basics: key terms, the players, and success stories.
• How companies can build and manage their reputation through social networking sites.
• The role of blogs (your own and outsiders’) in spreading news about your organization.
• Why and how to put together your own audio/video content and build an audience for it.
• Measuring the success of your social networking efforts.
Hope to see you there.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
What Social Channels Do I Need to Be On?
Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Slideshare, Twitter, etc.... the list of social media channels you or your company can participate in goes on endlessly. So if you are an established business, start-up, or individual entrepreneur, how do you know where you need a presence?
Simple answer: There's no simple answer. Each one of these channels has features that cater to specific audiences. Some of them even frown upon signing up as a business. But while it's impossible to try to maintain an active presence in more than 3-7 places, there are a few good reasons for owning your brand name on as many pieces of online real estate as possible. First, there's the SEO benefit of owning the url's of your brand name. But even more importantly, it's a good way to defend yourself against nefarious people or unhappy customers who want to develop their own "presence" on one of these channels. Another thing to remember is the power of joining forums in your industry. Getting your brand name, or your CEO's name, known as a thought leader in the places you are already reading, is a strong way to build influence.
As a social marketing consultancy, it's important for us to test just about everything out. So we probably have a broader presence than a normal person or company needs. But we need to understand what channels work best for retailers, organizations, charities, authors, B2B companies and more.
Now, this process can become pretty unwieldy, so we like using DandyID to keep track of everything for us. In addition to consolidating all of our presences in one place, it also has some pretty nifty widgets if you want to install your list directly into other channels.
So, we of course have a robust presence on LinkedIn:
But here are a few other places we've been setting up and testing lately. Not all of them have content yet. Keep up with our DandyID spot to follow where we add more channels.
Let us know what else you think we should be testing, and we'll give it a whirl.
How Much Should I Be Spending on Social Marketing?
(Part 2 in our series on "Getting Started in Social Marketing")
Over the last year, just about every brand has accepted and embraced that Social Marketing is a “must have,” not a “nice to have” program in their marketing arsenal. But one aspect that still faces boardroom controversy is how much to actually spend.
Remarkably, while any simple google search can return 3500 articles on “How to make social media work for you,” there are relatively few resources that give you hard data to take to the CEO. Based on our experiences, and a few pieces of data we’ve pulled from research reports, here’s at least a framework you can work around.
The Top Line Overview
On a very high level, social marketing has moved out of the “Discretionary Spending” or “Special Projects” line item of the overall budget and garnered its own classification. Qualitiatively, we hear people spending around 5% to 10% of the advertising budget on something that involves “social.” Some reports, such as this one from Avenue Social claim 3-6% of overall ad spending. (Note that the number is 3-6% of ad spending, not marketing spending.)
Now it’s hard to decide how much that number is changing in 2010, since a Coremetrics report about 2008 spending found, “78% marketing professionals saw that social media marketing was a way of getting an edge on their competitors. However, just 7.7% percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.” Also notable, is the statistic that
just 10% of companies are not engaging in any social media activity whatsoever.
Comparison to Your Overall Marketing Budget
One thing we can’t forget about is the size of your company’s overall budget. In 2008, the average cost of TV production for a 30 second spot was around $303,000 just to create it. If this is the scenario in which you market, it’s pretty easy to cut development of one spot and suddenly have $25k per month to spend on staffing an internal social marketing team.
Some companies are paralyzed by a lack of resources, accoriding to this report at Marketing Charts. The report says that more than half of companies (54%) say resourcing is a significant problem, and 9 out of 10 businesses (90%) say social media is taking up more time internally than a year ago. This indicates that before launching a social media program, some sort of staffing and training initiative is necessary.
The ROI Question
The research at Marketing Charts also found, “That many companies are experimenting with social media without yet reaping any measurable benefits. Only one-fourth of companies say that they have gained “real, tangible value” from social media, whereas 60% say that they have gained some benefit but nothing concrete.”
But the Econsultancy study found that, “More than half (52%) of companies who are heavily involved in social media marketing say that they have gained real value, compared with only 13% of companies who have “experimented but not done much.”
One way to interpret this data, is that companies need to spend money tomake money, and those that invest and make Social Marketing a real part of the budget are rewarded.
Brands of All Size Increasing Budgets
Forrester estimates at least give a perspective, if not actionable insight, to what the market as a whole will be doing.
They say, “B2B interactive marketing spending will climb to nearly $4.8 billion in 2014 as interactive channels continue to grab a larger share of the marketing pie. B2B marketers will continue to invest heavily in paid search but will also begin to invest in display advertising and emerging marketing tactics such as social and mobile marketing. In order to make the most of these investments, B2B marketers should focus on creating online customer interactions — not just driving leads — and develop a central team to direct emerging media strategy.”
So with all these considerations and estimates, at least 2 companies are coming out and talking about what kind of bets their placing. Australian Discount Airline Jetstar says it will direct 40% of its marketing budget to social media. “We’ve conducted some very successful marketing and PR campaigns via social media in the past 18 months, including YouTube and Twitter, and the response has been phenomenal,” said David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing.
While the top marketers in the world aren’t going to go up to 40%, their increases are becoming significant. Ad Age reports that Unilever says, “In the U.S., where people are spending 25% of their time in some sort of digital engagement, then you should be proportionate. ... You will find that we will be in the 20% areas in markets like the U.S. And you will find we'll be in the single [digits] in markets that are less developed. The company spent only 4% of its $864 million in measured media last year on internet spending, according to Kantar Media, and even doubling wouldn't get it to 20% this year.” However roughly 8-10% spend on digital indicates significant dedication to social. Likewise, P&G, which also doubled its measured U.S. internet spending last year to $100 million, estimates digital is above 10% of its marketing budget.
The Net Net
In conclusion, it’s become fair to estimate that an established company with integrated marketing campaigns, will be spending from 3-10% of their overall marketing budget on social marketing. That number may encompass full-time employees serving roles in community management, the licensing of analytics tools, and application and mobile development. But the good ROI tracking that comes with significant budget outlays should drive crisper, more efficient budget analysis in 2011.