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.

Facebook & Bing Partnership

Facebook and Bing have announced a new partnership to integrate "like" data and profile search to Bing. This article from Mashable does a good job of describing some of the advantages and unique ways that these companies are leading the innovation in social search.

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:

Event ticketing made social through Eventbrite

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.

Weekly Social Recap

Facebook

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:


Twitter

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.

Social Media Strategies at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts

Social Media Strategies, a course we've taught close to 10 times now, is tomorrow at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts. Past classes have included folks from ad agencies, retail firms, broadcasting companies and more, so it's always a great day of discussion. Thanks Larry Asher and Linda Hunt for continuing to invite us quarter after quarter. See you tomorrow.

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

Job Openings - Social Media / Community Leads

We're getting ready to roll out some job descriptions for a couple of Social Media / Community Leads. But before we put together a formal document, we want to get some referrals from the Seattle social media community.

There are a number of roles to fill, and they vary between placing people with clients, having folks join our team, and having some specialists help with some freelance project based work. So let us know if you know anyone who fits one or more of these skill sets:

• 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

Send inquiries to andy@social3i.com

New Favorite Social Media Tool - Flavors.me

Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I'm having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.

There's nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and - if you choose too (I haven't yet) - grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page.

There's real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can't decide if they should have different url's, different Facebook pages, etc... This gives you a nice aggregation capability.

For personal branding, I can't think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc... all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

2 Weeks With the iPad

I'm not necessarily a gadget guy. I like the toys, but I'm generally towards the tail end of the early adopters. For me to spend a lot of money on something, it needs to be good enough to justify replacing the time and energy I've already invested on something else.

I usually get pushed over the edge when I see that someone I respect has adopted the technology into their everyday life. So a few weeks ago, after I watched one of our clients taking notes on his slick little tablet, I went forth and joined the iPad nation.

Here are some notes now that I'm two weeks in:

- Super solid notetaking device. Easier and less intrusive than a laptop. Easy to share notes with everyone in the room.

- Love Keynote. Easy to make presentations on the fly. In fact, I was even able to build a quick soccer field in order to diagram some plays and show my youth team the starting lineup and subs.

- Love Flipbook. Super cool app for turning my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a mini-magazine.

- Haven't downloaded spreadsheet apps yet. This is a glaring hole so far, as I'd love to quickly run numbers.

- Netflix is fantastic. It's the easiest way I've ever seen for me to just quickly turn on a device and catch up on whatever series I happen to be watching all the way thru.

- Also, when I'm at my desk I find myself just using it for monitoring email and Pandora, so I don't have to bother with having it open on my desktop.

I haven't really gotten into games or anything yet. Also, I can't say I use the browser or email any differently that I'd use my iPhone, so that's not a real differentiator. And I'm just starting to get into the speech recognition stuff, but I haven't really nailed that yet.

Overall, it feels like there's a decent learning curve between making the device a really cool photo album and a fully functional work device. More to come.