From the category archives:

What People Say

New Year’s Social Media Resolutions

by admin

(* Source:  Laurens Bianchi *)

We’ve  decided to offer a helping hand towards all marketers and brands who have set their minds on social media in 2010. These 5 resolutions are just a start. We’re wondering if you can submit more must have resolutions,  in order to complete the list into a total of 10. So insert your social media resolutions in the comments!

Here are our first 5 resolutions:

1. Make Social Media Marketing Budget Line Item

Most Chief Marketing Officers are massively tapping into social media marketing in 2010. They all want that golden social media marketing strategy for 2010 and beyond. The first tip that we have for them: make sure to create a social media marketing budget line item in your SAP systems asap! Without it, you probably can’t spend budget on Social Media marketing (SMM) and having a SMM strategy or roadmap for 2010 and beyond will not be possible. Beware! Perhaps it’s already to late…

2. Generate ROI Using Social Media

The smart marketers that already comprised their social media marketing budgets for 2010 some months ago: make sure your social agency provides you with compelling and viral content. But most of all: let them deliver you ROI.

It’s nice to receive 1 million views for your viral video, or to gain 100,000 new fans on your Facebook page. But these views and friends are worthless if your agency doesn’t deliver you the most important things within marketing: increase your brand awareness, create leads and drive your sales!

3. Start Listening To The Audience

Before you start developing your golden social media strategy, make sure that you have gained all the right insights from listening to your audience. Make sure you know exactly what the audience’s sentiment is towards your brand, products and services. understand what the share of voice of your brand is and compare you social status with your competitors. Social media is all about people, these people have opinions, which can affect the audience’s perception towards your brand.

So stop doubting whether it’s too soon to start listening to your audience, because they have started discussing your brand within social already years ago!

4. Develop A Social Media Strategy

We already said in 2007, again in 2008 and 2009. Now again in 2010: if you want to play the social game, you got to have a clear strategy!

We all have become very social. Even when we don’t really realize it, brands included. Many brands still try to scream to their audience, but they’re not really sure anymore if they are being heard. Social media is still growing rapidly and your audience have so many options to interact with their network. So how can a brand can become one of them and step into the conversation? We know that online reputation, ratings and reviews are the decision making differentiators in the buying process of digital natives and that advertising comes next. Forrester showed us that 92% of all 16-34 years only buy a product if social influencers , opinion leaders and their peers have written a positive review about it.

So if you want to play a serious role within social media, you’ve got to have a clear, long term strategy. Relationships are being build within long term programs and not within 1 Facebook campaign. It’s just as in real life, strong relationships are not just for Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day, but for the whole year.

5. Always Remember The 4 C’s

So if you are that smart marketer and you have decided to develop your long term social media strategy, please adopt the 4 C’s of Community within your strategy, as published on Futurelab:

Content

Quality content is a great way to attract people who are needed to form the community that your brand is hoping to build. All community initiatives with relevant topics and content, have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant, either by your brand or refreshed by its customers.

Context

Context means understanding how and where to meet people, being there where your consumers are up and serving the right experience or content at the right time. Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community – and then enabling them to do so.

Connectivity

Communities thrive on emotional or sentimental, hard to measure activities that are relationship based. It’s not about mass communications but more about micro-interactions. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool for brands, but require people to maintain good relations. This should tell you that if you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.

Continuity

Communities which thrive often evolve over time to meet the evolving needs of users. Therefore you need to include functionalities such as blogs, forums and a navigation design which tags topics and references relevant products, a place where you can share ideas, vote for the best idea etc. Communities need to be flexible to evolve over time while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained over time.

So these are 5 resolutions we feel every marketer should engage in 2010. We’re looking forward to your inpu in order to complete the list into a total of 10!

Tagged as:

{ 0 comments }

I’m a Fan!

by admin

(* Source: Ian Stewart *)

Ian says…

If there’s one thing Asia has a lot of, it’s people. Billions of people. And all of us are a fan of at least one singer or band. That’s billions of fans. And as fans we are deeply engrossed in online social networks: 76% of online youth in Asia belong to at least one digital community. Considering there are 100’s of millions of youth in the region using the Internet, the power of online fan sites can’t be underestimated.
*Did you know:
- We belong to an average of four online communities
- We have an average of 100 online friends, and many have many more
- An online group only needs some 150 members for it to “self manage”
- Content becomes viral if it is passed on to as few as 1.2 others
- We all know about Kanye West at the MTV Awards

What is exciting and fundamental to grasp here is that the essence of social media is at the grassroots level. While the media (and sites like friendster) talk about scale into the 100’s of millions of users, the story starts in small, empowered online groups of friends receiving, creating and forwarding content on, out and up. Think about the recent frenzy over “Balloon Boy”. Apparently most of us knew about this within two hours of it happening. These days it isn’t hard and it doesn’t take long to build up a significant fan base. And it takes fewer people than you would think.

Brands, Bands, Fans

When applying the fabulously useable concept “Brands, Bands, Fans”** to Asia it is clear that the development of a Brand’s music strategy needs to start with a Band’s online Fans. But to date numerous sites have instead started with the artists, in the hope that the fans will come, and they didn’t. So they closed. But social networks are booming, and this bodes well as much for brands as it does for artists and their managers.

Empower the fans (give them free stuff)

For every official band page on the Net there are thousands of unofficial fan pages on social network sites, filled with passionate fans and their friends. How happy would they be to receive official content from their favourite band? A free wallpaper here, a skin there, easy. And how many people would they tell if their beloved singer left a post on their message board? They only have to tell 1.2 for it to begin a viral journey, but of course they will tell many more.

Ride the network effect (reward passing it on)

Tickets to a concert, exclusive songs, anything and everything will be received and forwarded. To accelerate the passing on of content, it’s not too hard to reward the more viral fan sites. From the more formal www.posse.com.au (points for selling concert tickets to friends) to the informal giving of gifts by a brand or label (at Friendster we have done this with free tickets for numerous concerts), social networks are built for rewarding social behaviour.

Brands: get involved (it won’t kill you)

If 2008 was the year for social media where brands asked “what?”, then 2009 has been all about “how?”. When looking at the campaigns in this year’s Media magazine Digital Awards, nearly every entry used social media to some degree. From launching a Fan page to spreading viral messages into the social ether, it was a year of brand exploration. And everyone succeeded just by being there.

Listen to the feedback loops (I like you, I hate you)

One of the most powerful aspects of online communities is the instant feedback they provide when things are great, and when they’re not. They will tell you if you don’t ask, but they will also tell you if you do take the time to engage. We recently saw the organizers of a recent series of concerts ask the fans for feedback and act on the advice to tweak and make change overnight. Free feedback, happy fans.

The market research capabilities of social communities are only just beginning to be realized. It was recently highlighted that the impact of an online community can be felt as far away as three degrees of separation.

In other words, what you are telling your friends can pass thru to their friends, and onwards to their friends. People are media. Fan sites are a social medium. Brands want to join the social stream. And Bands have social content. It’s the perfect marriage.

—
Friendster has over 100 million registered users; many are in SE Asia, most are under 25, the majority are members of one or more artist fan pages, and very few have ‘friended’ their parents on the site

* From various sources, including Synovate’s Young Asians, MTV Music Matters, and the book Viral Loop

** “Brand, Bands, Fans” is credited to the guys at Frukt, but only in this lifetime, next time I’m getting it first ☺

Tagged as: , ,

{ 0 comments }

How to create Advocacy and Conversation

by admin

(* Source: Frank Striefler *)

Franks shares some great advice…

View more documents from Frank Striefler.

Tagged as: , , , ,

{ 0 comments }

Social Media vs. Old Media

by admin

(* Source: Mike Johansson *)

Mike says…

If the two world views met on the street, here’s what they might say …

First a visual: As much as I think the Mac-PC TV commercials have both upsides and down, for the purposes of this exercise imagine that the actors are representing each side of the argument.

I’m sorry, but Old Media gets the PC actor John Hodgman and Social Media gets the Mac actor Justin Long

On Customers:
Social Media:
“We need our customers.”
“They are our best source of information.”
“They are the best judges of what they want.”
“Our role is to try to provide the information they want, when and where they want it.”

Old Media:
“Our customers need us.”
“They depend on us for information.”
“We are the best judges of what is news.”
“Our role is to provide information on the platforms we have on a schedule we can manage.”

On Communication:
Social Media:
“We believe worthwhile communication happens on any platform, anywhere.”
“And it should be free or nearly free.”
“We will pay for delivery of services only if we see value.”

Old Media:
“We believe no worthwhile communication can happen in 140 characters or less.”
“You get what you pay for … therefore freeloaders won’t ever get any good stuff.”
“We need money from advertisers and subscribers … or we don’t have a business.”

On The Future:
Social Media:
“We believe that vast collective knowledge will help everyone.”
“And those with the best information will gain the most credibility.”
“We see a future that is a bright information-sharing and interconnected age.”

Old Media:
“We believe only our expertise can help you sort through all this information.”
“Who better to judge the best information than the people who have done it for more than 100 years?”
“We see a bleak future without a clear information-sharing structure … a future without us!”

Tagged as: , ,

{ 0 comments }

5 Reasons Social Media Matters to Business

by admin

(* Source: Mike Johansson *)

1. Customers are increasingly there … in huge numbers
The phenomenal growth in the numbers of people on Social Networks and consuming Social Media can no longer be ignored. The recent Nielsen report on the five fastest Social Media (Global Faces and Networked Places) portals found that:

Twitter is now the fastest growing Social Media app. It grew 1,382 percent in the past year and has more than 7 million people tweeting away.

Facebook has more than 65 million people friending away and grew 228 percent in the past year.

MySpace and its teen-friendly vibe get roughly 75 million unique visitors a month (putting it ahead of Facebook’s 57 million).

LinkedIn and its business-networking members now number more than 33 million.

Wikipedia and other wiki-like information portals now have nearly 4 million contributors signed up to add to the information pool.

If these Social Media destinations have populations rivaling good-sized countries … countries whose populations grow several hundred percent each year … don’t you want to do business with these new “countries”?

2. Employees are there … more than you think
These vast populations include many of the people who work for you (and those who wish they worked for you).

According to survey data from 2007 (the most recent available), more than 75 percent of employees at U.S. companies are online, but not doing company business, for part of their business day. Of these, more than a third check in on social networks.

According to a Kiplinger Report story from July 2008 a growing number of U.S. employers have realized the value of social networks and have begun setting up internal networks where employees share ideas, best practices and future plans.

If your employees (present and future) are there shouldn’t you be there?

3. Competitors are there … and talking to your customers
A quick search on Facebook for the term “IBM” finds more than 500 groups dedicated to talking about and talking for IBM. A search for “New York Times” also finds more than 500 groups.

Check Twitter and you find a similar trend: More than 90 Twitter accounts have IBM as part of their name. The New York Times’ main Twitter account touches nearly 400,000 followers and that number is growing quickly.

Try it now: Search for your competitor on Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. See what they say about themselves and see what they say about you.
4. Intelligence is there … you will gain important insights
You can simply follow the streams of conversation in Social Media or deploy Social Media monitoring tools such as the one offered by Techrigy to know what people are talking about and whether they have a positive or negative view of your company and its products.

This type of intelligence cannot be had anywhere else. It also allows insight, response and reaction in real time.

5. Money is there … for the making and for the taking
People use Social Media for all kinds of purposes, but in one way, shape or form it’s about sharing information.

This information is a currency that can, and often does, influence spending decisions.

If Social Media is become THE place to share information it is also becoming THE place to learn before buying.

In an age where traditional push media (newspapers, magazines, radio and television) are losing audience at an alarming rate, Social Media and its pull - or sharing - approach is booming as a place for people to connect and get things done. Shouldn’t you and your business be there?

Tagged as: , ,

{ 0 comments }

Social Media Disasters

by admin

(* Source: Mike Johansson *)

Misspellings, missteps and missed opportunities for businesses on SoMedia

“Disaster” may seem like a strong word. But in Social Media, as in life, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.

What happens when something you’ve written strikes the wrong chord, has embarrassing errors or, worse, is just plain wrong?

Here, in no particular order, are things that can quickly take your Social Media efforts from a soaring trajectory to a downward death spiral.

Abusing – or misusing – English

Yes I am as guilty as the next when it comes to making mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. But I do usually catch most of these mistakes.

Correct use of English in Social Media is important because your written ideas are the first place someone encounters you. If they see mistakes their opinion of you, consciously or unconsciously, goes down. In the back of their mind they will assume this is representative of carelessness by your business or brand.

If you want to be seen as an expert or leader in your field you need to put your best foot forward in your communications – especially Social Media where everything you write is sitting in plain view for the world to see.

Hiding your agenda

The Social Media world is 99.9 percent transparent. If you want to survive and thrive in it you also need to be transparent. If you don’t openly state your commercial and other ties to what you are writing about or promoting you will be found out. But in Social Media it gets worse: Your credibility will disappear instantly when a reader discovers for themselves that you are directly connected to the thing you are promoting.

But it’s not just your connections that are problematic. You also need to be open about your agenda. We all have one. It’s best to spell out in the “About” area who you are and what your goals are.

All of this matters in Social Media because when “a bad egg” is discovered word spreads very quickly.

Having a thin skin

Many writings on Social Networking sites can seem to be critical. Some, in fact, are critical of you. How you respond to criticism online (as in the real world) can set you apart. If bad behavior by others elicits equally bad behavior from you who wins? No one. Of course.

The best response may be no response. Or you may want to wait an hour or two before crafting a firm and positive or at least neutral response that relies on facts and leaves out all traces of the personal.
At the very least any criticism should be private and between two people and not conducted in group emails, the comment areas of blogs or other public spaces.
Annoying (or outright offending) others

Social Media offers so many ways to be annoying. You can be “too connected” to others. You can ask them too often for stuff (and in this category I would include invitations to play Facebook games from people you barely know). You may keep mentioning your business interests over and over. Then, there are those who post offensive material. All of the above will get you un-followed, un-friended and un-connected.

Lack of focus

Many individuals and companies get into Social Media with no real goals or understanding of why they are there. This leads to Social Media platforms that leave those who join you confused: “I thought I started following this guy because he was interested in music, but now all he posts are annoying ‘feel good’ quotes.”

So work on one platform at a time and decide what you are there for. You do not have to narrowly define your purpose, but having a plan will help you get more out of your time on Social Media and will prevent you from damaging your your company’s image.

Being cliquey

If you’re spending all your time Re-Tweeting the same five people and they are Re_Tweeting you. Or you write back and forth with a dozen people on Facebook walls you’re likely not in Social Media, but rather you are in “Club Media.”

These tight groups in Social Media are terrible for your brand. To outsiders – the vast majority of the rest of your followers, fans and connections – this seems like a club they cannot get into or, worse, would not want to get into.

Practice good Social Media skills by reaching out to the many rather than the few.

Tagged as: , ,

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries