Jul 14, 2010 / / Social Media Marketing
More from Twitter:
Jun 24, 2010 / / strategy
Apr 13, 2010 /
Social Media Sharing Trends - Email Still Rules
Key findings include:
- The top channels of sharing include, email (59%), instant messenger (25%), social networking sites (14%).
- Email and IM continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing
- Facebook with a 79% share dominates the sharing in the social networking channel
- Twitter is growing in popularity but is still just 5% among social networks.
- Only 2% of shares happen over Bookmarking sites but digg rules this method.
- In the Email channel, Yahoo Mail is the most preferred, followed by MSN.
- Google’s services like Google Bookmarking, Google Talk, and Gmail, are lagging in their respective channels when it comes to shared content
- LinkedIn, as a networking site, ranks the lowest when it comes to social media sharing.
Read the complete report at Tell-a-Friend.
Mar 31, 2010 / / Social Media Marketing
Should Employee Access to Social Networks Be Blocked?
Is it a waste of time for your staff to spend two to three hours on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks or does it increase customer engagement? Some large companies have decided against social media access. In this article CorMetrics attempts to provide "5 reasons NOT to seal your social media borders."
They outline five critical questions that must be answered before blocking employee access to social networks. While I disagree with some of their arguments and logic, I do agree with their conclusion.
1. Which Social Media channels does your company use?
They have identified four different types of social media channels or networks, including those that
a) foster collaborative work and knowledge sharing (e.g., corporate blogs and/or wikis),Some companies may encourage use of internal blogs and wikis but discourage employee contributions to external blogs and wikis.
b) facilitate professional networking and information exchange (e.g., LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo),
c) provide methods of quick information distribution (e.g., Twitter, Naijapulse, Identi.ca, instant messaging), and
d) help us stay connected with friends and family (e.g., Facebook, Hi5).
The article points out the obvious that if your "company is very active on Facebook, it is counter-productive to block employee access to it." The same would go for Twitter, YouTube, etc.
2. They suggest that laws and regulations may have a role in the decisions.
But most companies make it clear to employees that work computers can only be used for work. They reserve the right to restrict access. CorMetrics does point out that "most courts follow the principle that if something has been quietly tolerated over a period of time, it is permitted. In fact, rules that are not consistently and fairly enforced cannot be used to justify later sanctions against staff."
This reinforces the need for a formal Social Media Policy along with standard enforcement practices.
3. Could resistance be futile?
While companies can prevent workers from accessing social media sites using company equipment and Internet connections they can't restrict what employees do on their own time using mobile phones. For that matter an employee can take their personal computer to a WiFi hot spot and tweet all they want. What's the issue here? This does not affect worker productivity.
The article suggests that employees might need to use Twitter to notify a client that they will be late for a meeting. Does this justify leaving open Twitter access when there are still traditional ways of communicating with clients?
4. Could greater collaboration increase know-how?
They say "Maybe we agree that resisting the increasing pervasiveness of social media in people’s lives is futile." Really, is it?
They are right when they say, "Of course, the Internet can facilitate collaborative work efforts. For instance, with the help of internal networks, companies have used blogs and wikis to better share information and know-how among staff in different divisions and countries. Even participating in wikis run by an association or professional society (e.g., IEEE, ACM, APA) may help foster learning and staying up-to-date with the latest developments within a profession or industry."
"But we disagree that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge for the average Joe, as claimed by experts participating in a recent Pew study."
5. What factors may influence social media usage?
Ok, let's skip to their conclusion: "Instead of pervasive limitation or outright blockage of access, following the above hones in on using selective censorship, allowing employees the opportunity to use social media smartly for job-related purposes." I agree.
Read more of this article.
Mar 21, 2010 / / Twitter
Happy Birthday Twitter
According to Wikipedia, the first tweets were published on March 21, 2006, exactly 4 years ago. Happy Birthday Twitter.
Jack Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST), March 21, 2006: "just setting up my twttr".
This post was followed by Biz Stone with his first post at 12:51 PM: "just setting up my twttr"
And the rest is history.
Mar 1, 2010 / / Social Media Marketing
Microsoft Adds LinkedIn Plugin to Outlook
In February, Microsoft released a "beta" test version of the Outlook Social Connector. The add-on software, which was first announced last November, adds a new pane to the main e-mail reading screen on Outlook. When a user clicks to read an e-mail message, the new pane fills up with the sender's most recent social-networking activities. Those could include the addition of a professional contact on LinkedIn or a "what I'm doing now" status update from Facebook.
Microsoft's new software will also treat Outlook itself as a social network. If the e-mail sender and recipient are jointly working on a document stored on a company's Sharepoint server, both will see updates if one logs on to make edits.
For now, the new software doesn't let people use Outlook to push information back up to LinkedIn, Facebook or other sites. But you can invite people in your Outlook contacts to join your professional network on LinkedIn
LinkedIn, which is primarily used for business networking online, is the first company to make its add-in software available. This past November, LinkedIn announced a partnership with Microsoft to bring the LinkedIn Professional Network right within your Microsoft Outlook Inbox. People using Office 2003, 2007 and beta versions of Office 2010 should first download the updated Outlook Social Connector beta then add the LinkedIn plugin. Read more on the LinkedIn blog.
Microsoft said the Facebook and MySpace plug-ins will be ready for download by the time Office 2010 goes on sale in June.
Feb 7, 2010 /
Acaba de lanzar nuevas páginas para Michael Foods en México
Acaba de lanzar nuevas páginas para Michael Foods para promover los productos de huevo disponible en México. La información está disponible en Inglés y Español y el motor de búsqueda optimizado (SEO) para los huevos revueltos, huevos enteros, las yemas y claras de huevo y Hytex.
Just launched new pages for Michael Foods to promote egg products available in Mexico. Information is available in English and Spanish and search engine optimized (SEO) for scrambled eggs, whole eggs, yolks and egg whites and Hytex.
Feb 3, 2010 / / Brand Marketing
Successful Brands Satisfy Basic Desires
Brian Martin's article in Ad Age is a primer on what make successful brands. "The most-successful brands don't focus on what we need; they focus on what we want." So according to Brian, what do people want, exactly?
- To feel safe and secure.
- To feel comfortable.
- To be cared for and connected to others. (think social networking
- To be desired by others.
- To be free to do what we want.
- To grow and become more.
- To serve others and give back.
- To be surprised and excited.
- To believe there is a higher purpose.
- To feel that they matter.
Successful Brands Do a Good Job of Satisfying People's 10 Basic Desires" by Brian Martin
Click on the image to enlarge it. The image illustrates Maslow's hierarchy of needs which provides an understanding of what motivates consumers to interact with a brand. Hmmm... similar.
Jan 25, 2010 / / Search Engine Marketing
SEO Tip - Separate Web Sites for Different Parts Of A Business?
Would it be better to create a separate website for each part of a business, ie: networking, membership, boutique, or would it be better to build everything new under the same Web site?
There's just no one answer for every situation. It depends on your objective and target audience.
For reputation management you want multiple Web sites appearing in search engines to push the "bad stuff" off the first page of results. This can be accomplished by using different sub-domains for each section of a site, or with separate domains for a corporate site, brand marketing site(s), store site and/or blog. Add various social media sites including Twitter and Facebook and throw in some directory profiles including Wikipedia and the first page is filled with "good stuff".
If you have distinctively different audiences for products under the same brand then you need different sites for usability purposes. The look and feel of a consumer focused site may need to be different from the commercially targeted site and also from the investor site.
For globalization and localization you should consider using different country code top-level domains (ccTLD). If research finds that your customers prefer to buy local or if your product line is very different by country then distinctly different sites are warranted. If a searcher specifies "Pages in Mexico" then the ccTLD is the best way for the search engine to filter the results. Of course you can always use Webmaster Tools to tell Google that your dot com sub-directory is country specific but the results don’t look local to your customer.
So determine…
- your objective
- your target audience(s)
- tactics that will move each target audience toward your objective
Jan 21, 2010 / / Social Media Marketing
Marketers Investing Heavily in Social Media in 2010
The seventh annual survey on marketing investments was released today by integrated marketing services provider Alterian.
The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals - 98% in North America and Europe and 2% in Asia Pacific and other regions.
Results highlights
- 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010.
- Amoung those planning to invest, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.
- More than a third (36 percent) of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools.
- Nearly half of respondents (42%) said they don’t currently incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and e-mail database.
- The research also found that over half of respondents (51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multichannel customer engagement – in fact only 7 percent make no effort at all.
Jan 19, 2010 / / Social Media Marketing
Twitter Growth Declining
Today Hubspot released its third State of the Twittersphere report, which shows a significant decline in the growth of Twitter users but also indicates the average Twitter user is more engaged.
- Twitter user growth peaked at 13% in March 2009 by October it was down to 3.5%
- Traffic to Twitter.com has declined but may be an indication that more people are using third-party applications such as TweetDeck
- Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July, it had 70
- The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July it was only following 47
- The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July that number was 119
- Peak tweeting time is in the evening between 10 and 11pm
- The highest usage days for Twitter are Thursday and Friday. The lowest usage is on the weekend.
Download the full January 2010 report. Or download the July 2009 and December 2008 reports.
Jan 16, 2010 / / Google, Search
How Old Is That Web Page?
One method of for determining the last modified date uses Javascript. Type javascript:alert(document.lastModified) into the address bar and press Enter. A pop-up window will appear with the date and time of the page's last update.
Unfortunately this does not work if the page has any dynamic elements that automaticly update on page load. Many modern pages are dynamic but for the true cobwebs this function will work.
Another way to filter out older Web pages is on Google.com. Under "Show options" you can choose to filter results as follows:
- Latest
- Past 24 hours
- Past week
- Past year
- Specific date range
If you search in the "Past 24 hours" the results will display how many hours ago the page was found by Google. Of course this is accurate only for the major sites that are frequently indexed and can be very helpful when searching for current events.
This functionality can also be very useful for finding recent changes to competitor sites or for monitoring timely posting by your own content producers.
Jan 9, 2010 / / Mobile
Mobile Web Use Small But Growing
Web traffic from mobile devices remains low with 1.3% of all page views in December for North America. But a new study by Quantcast found that the share of Web traffic attributed to mobile devices has increased 110% in North America and 148% globally in the past year.
Quantcast suggests that the accelerating development of devices, operating systems and browsers is driving the growth.
While Apple's iPod has a dominant 60% share of mobile page views this is being eroded by emerging competitors in the smartphone market. The Motorola Droid captured almost 4% share in its first full month, overtaking the Palm Pre. The Droid has also helped Google's Android operating system surpass the BlackBerry OS with a 12% share of North American mobile Web traffic.
Quantcast is predicting that mobile's share of page views in North America will increase to 2.3% in 2010. Globally, mobile's share will increase from 0.95% to over 1.8%. A host of new devices from manufacturers Motorola, HTC and BlackBerry will fuel that growth this year.
So Where Do Mobile Users Go?
According to the Nielsen Company, Google Search was the top mobile property in December:
- Google Search - 28 million unique visitors
- Yahoo Mail - 23 million,
- Facebook - 19 million.
- Gmail - 18 million
- Weather Channel - 14 million
Watch for Google search to gain even more as their efforts to provide search suggestions based on location and click-to-call mobile ads mature and gain acceptance.
Jan 6, 2010 / / Brand Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
SEO Tip - No Registration Marks ® in Page Titles
Special characters are not always supported in browser window title bars and they can appear poorly in search engine results.
The last example above from the Lowes site can be blamed on a poor content management system that allowed the error through. Below is an example of another page on the same site where the registration mark is displayed correctly in the search results.
The point is why risk hurting your search engine click throughs with a poorly displayed result when it isn't necessary?
Registration marks are not legally required in page titles. For example none of the major companies place registration marks in title tags on their sites. See trademark guidelines at Microsoft and IBM.
A general best practice for offline communications is that registration marks should appear in the first or most prominent usage of the mark. Typically a Web site will cover all the trademarks in a legal statement on the site. Again, see Microsoft and IBM for examples of best practices.
While we're talking about marks, be sure that you understand the differences between ®, ™ and ℠. This should be detailed in your Web Site Style Guidelines and/or Brand Guidelines:
The registered trademark symbol, designated by ® (a circled R) is a symbol used to provide notice that the preceding mark is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. Trademarks not so registered are instead marked with the trademark symbol ™, while unregistered service marks are marked with the service mark symbol ℠. The proper manner to display these symbols is immediately following the mark in superscript style.
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