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In the past few years, social has gone from being a consumer phenomenon to an enterprise opportunity. But many companies are struggling with how to implement strategies and realize ROI from their social investments.
The new IBM Center for Applied Insights study, “Charting the social universe: Social ambitions drive business impact,” found that as many as 74% of social decision makers recognized that a social business uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees and partners, but only 20% felt their companies were truly social.
So how do companies navigate the social journey? The study found that companies adopt social capabilities through five primary social ambitions, or entry points -- distinct clusters of social capabilities aimed at realizing specific business goals....
The ever-evolving media landscape presents significant challenges to marketers.
Brands are now required to work out how best to communicate across a growing number of channels ranging from traditional media to digital environments, all the while maintaining a consistent message and identity.
To find out how marketers are adapting to deal with the change in the way that people engage with media channels, Econsultancy and Mediaocean have today published a new report entitled Managing Media Convergence. The report is based on a survey of 124 agencies as well as in-depth interviews with 18 executives from agencies and brands, all with significant interest and experience in managing media.
It covers how to define the convergent environment, identifies pain points in managing new workflows and examines how the measurement of media is evolving as a result. The author identified four key trends running through the report....
Keeping up with the social universe is challenging but necessary if you want to operate your marketing at unfathomable speeds.
Social marketing now drives a faster everything. In fact, social forces marketers to go faster, not the other way around. It’s for this exact reason that businesses are afraid to become a social business.
Take Uber for example. Their vision was simple in creating a service that put the power of seamless ‘right now’ transportation into the palm of our hands. How about Apple? Steve Wozniak talked about how they originally set out with a simple vision to build a personal computer. They built the first personal computer that delivered a word processor.
It turned out that the computer called for networking, which quickly grew into the need for the internet. We needed a way to see the new clusters of information created on the internet, so search engines were born. And now, social commerce is enabled. Steve says “we did not build a computer knowing all this was going to happen, we started with a simple vision.”...
Businesses can no longer afford to have top leaders sit on the social media sidelines, a new study finds.
More than three-quarters of executives worldwide believe it is a good idea for CEOs to participate in social media, the research from public relations firm Weber Shandwick and research partner KRC Research found. The study identified a wide array of benefits that come with top executives who are socially active online.
More than 70% of those surveyed said CEO sociability increases information-sharing throughout the business, improves company reputation, demonstrates innovation, humanizes the company and improves business results....
Like millions of music fans, I explore online radio stations and YouTube often. Searching to find, curate, save, share and enjoy new music of all kinds. Let's just say "jazz" doesn't entirely cover my interests....
The social media lessons are simple, valuable and worth sharing: - Engage with your fans
- Make it personal...
If you’re a marketer or business owner, you probably know that social media is an important way to market your business online and may already have a presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. But in the world of social media, nothing stays the same for long. To keep your business on the forefront online, it’s important to stay up to date on emerging social networks that can help you spread the word about your business online. So, we put together this list of seven social media sites for SMBs to watch. New Social Media Sites to Watch Several hot new social media sites have launched recently. Will they be the next big things in social media marketing? Only time will tell, but here are a few to keep your eye on....
Marketers can reach a greater audience than ever by combining the power of social media and storytelling. The game has changed. We no longer live in a broadcast era where marketers can simply buy people’s attention with a TV campaign. There are different rules now and we need to earn the attention of our audience. We have a connected consumer revolution. The consumer is now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). So there has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers. And there are bigger things at work as well. We saw it with the Arab Spring, and the critical role social media had in the way information was shared. We saw it with the Occupy Movement as well. Social media can have an impact on traditional power structures. From a marketer’s perspective, that means that we’re moving towards pull versus push approach, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content. All of these trends are turning the traditional media model on its head, and brands are evolving into media properties. One of the best examples of this is Red Bull. Red Bull is putting out such compelling content that traditional media properties like NBC are buying the rights to this content. They’ve completely flipped the model around as a brand, where the broadcasters are after them for their content. They’re a great example of a brand doing it well in social....
Social media has grown to much more than an avenue for teenage ramblings about what they had for dinner.... It’s hard to believe that despite the life cycle of social media being only in its infancy, it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives so profoundly. Organizations have finally begun to recognize the importance of building a business platform that can seamlessly amalgamate the interests of employees and customers. Companies are branching out via social media tools such as blogs, forums, viral videos, Facebook contests, etc. that allows customers to see the dynamic personalities driving corporate entities. Linear processes and conventional marketing models are rusted chains clinging to your organization’s arms, preventing it from reaching its true potential. In order to do so, bold and brilliant leaders who are willing to embrace social media must step up to the mantle and overhaul outdated business models to take your organization to new levels. Here are 5 essential tips to follow to become a truly successful social media leader....
"I just want brands to focus on sentiment that matters and not on what is facile and easy to measure.... ... SMT: How much do social media departments understand that positive or negative sentiment may not matter as much as one would think? Did data ever suggest that it might, or was it never quite analyzed enough? AR: To be clear, I think sentiment matters a lot--but most brands are worrying about spikes in negative sentiment when they ought to worry about the everyday grind of negative brand experiences that drag down brand perception, consideration and loyalty. Conversely, many marketers do facile social media marketing to create spikes in positive sentiment, but these are much less powerful for increasing brand consideration than simply improving the product experience and allowing trusted consumer WOM to carry the brand message. To specifically answer your question, social media departments tend to hang on every little detractor event and still focus too much on posting photos designed to get likes rather than to make a brand impression. Most seem not to not understand these efforts have little to no impact on the brand. In part, this is because they are focused on bad metrics that are not tied to business results (such as the number of likes and retweets) and in part because social media departments do not have the power to change what matters most--customer service, product quality, packaging, etc. Right now, many social media professionals are working around the edges rather than at the core where change is needed, but you do see some exceptions--USAA, American Express and Home Depot come to mind. These are companies that have dedicated themselves to the customer, and social is considered an essential component rather than something to be bolted-on to business as usual....
There is a lot of social media sites out there, but what are the differences between these platforms and why would businesses want to use each specific one? Depending on your industry some might work better for you than others, but I believe that all businesses should be using these top social networks as much as they can. Today, people are no longer turning to the yellow pages to find the services or products you offer, but instead they are doing a quick search online. Making sure you have a positive presence in the top social media sites is important. These are my personal thoughts and opinions on the seven top social media networks (by user base) and an idea of what type of content you might see and want to use on each one....
..Social.com lets marketers integrate CRM information from Salesforce.com with data held by social media companies. For example, a marketer buying targeted advertising on Facebook could combine the interests expressed by Facebook users with its own customer information in order to refine the audience for a campaign. The dashboard includes a "trending" word cloud that can help marketers identify topics or hashtags to which they can quickly tie sponsored stories, posts or tweets. Speaking at a Salesforce.com customer day in San Francisco, Adam Bain, chief revenue officer for Twitter, called this "buying into the moment." Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce.com, told ClickZ, "We can connect real-time social listening with ad campaigns. If a hashtag is trending and has positive social sentiment, you can buy ads against whenever someone uses that hashtag, via Twitter keyword targeting."...
... Each of the social channels caters to different ways of communicating, of course, such as Twitter, for short bursts of content in 140 characters or less and Pinterest, where you can post for pictures and beautiful images as part of your communications strategy. But there are plenty of tools in the PR playbook that apply across the board. Chris Vary, executive VP of digital innovation at Weber Shandwick, tackled how PR pros can use three of the main social channels more effectively during a presentation last week at PR News’ Big 3 Conference (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook). The presentation, titled “The Big Picture on The Big Three,” included the following tips for using the three channels for PR and communications...
What do you know about your audience? Are your fans, friends, or followers engaged? Do you have a plan>? What are others saying about you and how are you responding? Use this checklist to determine how healthy your social media strategy is.... You may be posting on a regular basis and growing your list of fans, friends, and followers. But is it really enough? A healthy social media strategy will take into consideration the needs of your prospects and customers, as well as finding ways to efficiently plan, track, and measure your efforts. But the question remains, how can you really determine if your social media strategy has a pulse?...
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...Guess what? It didn’t matter at all if your business used Vine or not. And if Vine had turned out to be the next Pinterest, you would have had plenty of time to catch up — there wasn’t much advantage in being early...
Excellent case study on how a Napa Valley winery hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty.How can wineries use social media to increase sales when the law prohibits them from giving away product samples?Whitehall Lane, a 20-year-old Napa Valley winery run by the Leonardini family, has hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty....
Our imagination tends to outpace our ability to invent. And something can be invented long before it’s a conventional part of people’s lives.
So we must separate the bells and whistles from the nuts and bolts.
Creating a strategy focused on measurable business goals will help you develop a filter that helps decipher flash-in-the-pan technologies from the sea changes. (How to develop this type of strategy is an entirely different post topic).
But instead of focusing on the technology side of the future, focus on the human side. Human behavior is a more consistent bet than technology. If we prepare our website for the future with human nature in mind, we will put our organization in a good position regardless of how the flood of technology leaves things.
5 Future-proof ideas for websites
If we bet on technology, we can either be really right, or really wrong. But if we bet on human nature, we can count on consistency and know that our website is going to be well-positioned for the future. Besides, there’s no prize for beating your audience to the future (unless you’re the inventor)....
Ian Cleary founded RazorSocial.com and built it into an award-winning blog in only six months. I invited Ian to Marketing Smarts to discuss his approach to content creation, as well as the tools he used to build his blog audience, email list, and social media following.Ian is a social media tools and technology specialist; he is also a respected speaker on social media, technology, and blogging. His blog, RazorSocial, was named one of the Top 10 Social Media blogs of 2013 in the annual Social Media Examiner blog awards after only six months of operation. Here are just a few highlights from our conversation....
What do The Walt Disney Company and the WWE have in common (other than lucrative merchandising revenue and a cast of memorable characters? If you followed the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, which “analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels,” you’d know that Disney and the WWE are two of the most socially savvy brands out there. Apparently, people are still gaga for staged fighting and Donald Duck.
Did these corporate giants reach such great social heights by pursuing the exact same social media goals? Of course not. Disney and the WWE are vastly different companies with vastly different business objectives. You don’t market sweaty, hulking wrestlers the same way you do talking mice.These two very different companies achieved social media success by applying specific social media tactics to achieve specific business objectives.
You may not be a multibillion dollar business with a killer mascot (at least not yet), but you can still do social like the best of them, so long as you connect your business objectives to an effective social media marketing strategy....
Is your company using the power of social media to its full potential? In both a personal and business space, social media can be used to start meaningful conversations. However, many business owners do not take the medium seriously enough to invest in it. If social media is used correctly, it could have a positive impact on a company’s sales. How? Since social signals are becoming a more influential factor in determining placement in search results, using social channels properly can play a role in getting your site found more easily online. And that has positive correlation to sales. Here are three examples of methods to garner sales from multiple social media channels....
The academic and business publication has quietly grown a digital presence.... Over the last several years, the Harvard Business Review has quietly grown its digital presence, and it points to social as the main reason. HBR is a cross between a magazine and an academic journal. But with the exponential growth in digital, the outlet is trying to be more egalitarian without watering down its heavily researched and often didactic business-management content. The publication, which costs $100 per year or $17 a month, believes social media’s role as a democratization tool can make its content more accessible to a wider audience. “Social has been a key channel for us to increase the impact of these ideas,” said Eric Hellweg, HBR’s digital strategy director. “That’s the heart of what we do. But to unearth these ideas and tell them in the social realm, it becomes an effective way to spread these ideas around the world. It’s a great way to get reach and influence.”...
Rather, to improve your social media performance, you need an easy-to-implement routine you can stick to because social media isn’t a one time advertising campaign that’s run and done. It’s an on-going process that, like real life relationships, builds momentum over time. Don’t believe it? Check out Syncapse’s research that proves Facebook yields revenuesfrom existing customers. Get your small business’s social media engagement on track with these baby steps to build a daily social media routine.
As marketers, it is our jobs to assure our clients that the time and money that they are investing in social media is not in vain. Therefore, we are constantly tasked with searching for studies and statistics that suggest that social media is still heading for world domination. One particular source I like to turn to for said stats is AllTwitter.com by MediaBistro. They frequently feature studies done by excellent social media companies. Recently, they featured an infographic by Balihoo that had some great and validating social media statistics. As we know, infographics are meant to present data in a quick and easy to digest way, so let’s apply some context to the data....
Will Google fold YouTube, Gmail and Places into Google Plus? Suddenly 1.5 billion users on one platform, with Businesses having only one Page to manage. Good or no? Oh, and Google’s Authorship Markup suddenly screws with your SEO (search engine optimisation) and SMO (social media optimisation) in ways that you can only imagine. (Google’s SMO search algorithm) The images show the eery similarity between the rebranding of YouTube into OneChannel and Google Plus. Of course Google Plus could get a new name of OneChannel instead?...
Great questions and examples... One of the most effective techniques you use on your ecommerce site to increase the confidence of buyers is 'social proof'. Social proof is the phenomena where people tend to believe that the decision and actions of others reflect the correct behaviour in a given situation. Here are 11 examples of social proof in action on ecommerce sites....
New research released by the U.K.’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has flagged significant growth in social networking among older Internet users — which is helping to offset lower rates of growth across younger age groups. Ofcom’s latest Adult media uses and attitudes report, which examines 2012 U.K. data, indicates that more than a third (35%) of 55 to 64 year-old Internet users created a social networking profile last year — up by half in just one year (24% in 2011). Ofcom notes that it’s the only age-group with a “significant increase” in social networking growth but the research also found that a quarter (25%) of Internet users aged 65+ also set up a social network profile last year....
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High level insight into how to make social work for business.