Posts Tagged ‘social media marketing’
Social media trends indicate that online marketing is set to undergo a dramatic makeover. Businesses are increasingly integrating social networking websites into their marketing strategy. A recent study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (a representative body of American marketers) revealed that 26% of marketers found trends in social media taking it towards further growth.
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Tags: social media marketing, trends
Posted on Feb 24, 2009 by Rick to Social Media
Wow, just writing this headline makes me feel like I’m selling some scummy ‘get rich quick’ product. Don’t worry, I’m not. Don’t have 140 million customers yet? That’s okay too. This will probably work even if you only have a few customers.
Inspired by a recent Facebook calamity, I though I’d talk about one of the fundamentals of social media marketing.
First, about the calamity: Facebook recently made an update to their Terms of Service (the little link at the bottom of the page that no one ever read, until now). To summarize, the change indicated that Facebook could now use information and content uploaded to the site for as long as they wanted to. Previously, this section stated that, upon canceling an account, users’ personal information and content would be removed. A swift and fierce backlash across the social web forced Facebook to quickly revert back to the old Terms of Service while they reconsidered this move.
From a social marketing perspective, it’s important to pay attention to what has happened here. First, Facebook made a change to a policy that almost no one pays attention to. Next, a detail-oriented blogger drew attention to the change causing word spread quickly and uncontrollably across the web. Outrage on the social Web forced Facebook to almost immediately reconsider the change in order to prevent ill-will towards their network. A simple post, which took all of 30 minutes to write, announced Facebook’s decision helped them to regain much of the confidence of their customers.
At this point in time, the social Web has responded well to the quick response on the part of Facebook to reconsider. While some damage has been done, it’s nothing compared to the alternative where users on a large scale could have potentially moved on to another network offering more privacy. Companies like Facebook clearly understand that the power of the social web and yield to its demands. Do you?
All companies are subject to the same elements that effect social networks just like Facebook is. Consumers are commenting, rating, blogging and discussing purchase decisions long before making them. The worst thing a company can do is to not be involved in the communities where its potential customers are active.
Most importantly, ignoring negative feedback on the Web can destroy a company or brand’s reputation. It’s not enough to ‘be aware’ of what consumers are saying. In the previous example, Facebook could have just ignored the comments and stuck to their guns. I can’t say for sure what would have happened, but I can that the effects would have been damaging.
It’s pretty amazing how many marketers still ‘put earmuffs on’ every time they find a negative comment on the web. Many still discount the negative comments and continue feel good about the positive ones. Unfortunately, consumers do not behave this way. A single negative comment can be enough to keep a consumer from buying a brand of car, booking a hotel room or eating at a restaurant. Responding to feedback, both positive and negative, is most often the best approach to establishing prescience and showing you care. A response allows you to express to that customer, and other consumers, that you’ve heard the complaint and intend to address it in order to make future experiences better.
Do know what you’re consumers are saying about you? More importantly, have you responded to let them know that you’re paying attention?
Tags: facebook, social media marketing
Social media marketing is the new frontier in marketing for many businesses, large or small. There has never been a better way to reach a mass audience, already engaged and ready to receive information.
The larger social media sites—MySpace or Facebook—are primarily populated by younger people with a bit more disposable income to spend on various products or services. However, in addition to these social media powerhouses, there are a number of smaller sites out there, catering to this same audience. Many businesses are taking advantage of the unfettered access to this audience by taking on a new form of advertising.
Social media marketing throws out the old rules of marketing in the forms of print advertising or billboards and instead, utilizes the Web to reach an audience. Think of it like this, for the more traditional forms of advertising, media outlets and cable channels displayed adverts that were not interactive during news programming or other shows similar to a news format. The major difference in social media marketing is that the user controls it. And it targets the people looking for your product or service and avoids those who are not.
Blogs have also become more popular in the social media marketing realm because they often develop a dedicate readership and you can often integrate advertising content into the general topic of the blog, getting your message out on a subconscious level. Blogs allow you to reach a segmented audience who is already interested in your topic; it’s simply up to you to tout your service or product to close the deal.
Social media marketing allows businesses to think outside the box when it comes to reaching their customers. Taking advantage of these online options can not only enhance your existing business, but also allow you an opportunity to reach a new audience you may not have otherwise had access to without the benefits of social media marketing.
Tags: social media marketing
Tangible and the intangible—something you can feel, smell and taste versus a concept or an idea—it’s the crux of some tired and drawn out debates. One I can name off the top of my head—religion—has probably claimed a few more lives than social media; but the question still remains, is it more engaging than the traditional mediums?
Well, yes and no…
What Bob Hoffman misunderstands in ‘A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing‘ is that the Internet was never really intended to retire traditional medias but, instead, act as another weapon to the marketing arsenal as a whole.
Where Television and Radio and Print advertisements drop the baton, Social Media Marketing picks it back up and delivers, regardless of location or socioeconomic status.
“[television]. You interact with the medium all the time. You change the channel. You turn the volume up and down. You lighten and darken the picture. But you don’t think of it as an interactive medium because you can’t interact with the content,” says Hoffman.
Fair enough, but local stations aside, a cable subscription costs money and is certainly not portable. Internet access may come with a price, but public libraries, and the wildfire that is free WiFi have made it nearly impossible not to use and experience the Internet whether at work, school, or home.
“So the best hope for the web as a truly interactive marketing medium is the conversation, i.e. social marketing. I am sure there are wonderful examples of marketers building valuable and profitable social networks… For every success you post, I can post a hundred failures. Let’s make that a thousand.”
A thousand, in case that startled some, is a just a random number the ill-formed toss around for dramatic effect. If I had to assume, “success” in this case is defined strictly as conversion, a sale, and only the sale. Social Media Marketing, on the other hand, is a different animal. Where television ads are given 30 to 60 seconds to sell you on a product or an idea, the Internet has no such time-restriction, and social media serves as its salesman, fleshing out and closing the sale.
Social Media Marketing accomplishes 2 goals—other than working towards a ROI—that other mediums do not.
•It can reach a broad to extremely defined demographic regardless of location.
•In comparison to traditional marketing platforms, it has a less demanding initial investment.
While my heart will always be with traditional media—print advertising in particular—my mind presides in social media marketing; it’s still relatively new and consistently expanding, and offers new and highly-interactive outlets to reach an audience.
At the end of the day, I believe Mr. Hoffman and both factions-traditional and new media—are invaluable and have a lot to teach one another.
Tags: social media marketing
Do you remember that old campy saying, Go big, or go home? Of course you do. It’s usually tossed around when the last few seconds are waning away from the clock and the score is tied. “It’s either go, big or go home,” someone will say. Well, that same logic applies to Web 2.0. You either go all out to make it work or it’s not worth doing.
The successful social media campaign is similar to raising a lion cub. If you don’t put forth the time and finesse, it will grow up to maul you in your sleep. But if you make all the right moves, you’re left with a loyal marketing tool that that, instead, ravages your competition.
So why do you need a presence in social media? Well, let me explain…
As you may have guessed, social media is not a large carnivorous cat. It may harbor some similar qualities, but I believe it is much more approachable.
Social media gives you a voice. A website will always remain the face of your brand on the web, but this is Web 2.0, the current state of the internet, and that is simply not enough. To reach your target demographic, you have to be willing to step beyond your existing level of interaction. This means becoming an active voice of authority in your respective community, rebuilding your reputation, and sharing, sharing, sharing.
Succeeding on today’s web is sharing on the web; broadcasting information across the various medias. If you aren’t sharing something, you’re losing relevance and cred.
Social media is also about making and maintaining connections. Blogs, social networks, and, yes, even media sharing are all ripe for monetizing and reciprocating traffic. And the brilliance behind it, what is truly unique, is that a successful campaign does not necessarily depend on a linking scheme. It’s about who you know and what you know. If you’re influential in your field, people will link to you, traffic will pump through your channels; all of this without offering any incentive other than valuable information.
Do these concepts sound vague to the level of daunting? That’s because, in reality, they are, and they require a carefully planed and executed strategy to make them work.
But what about viral media? Well, media won’t go viral if it’s not contagious.
The fact is, unless you are serious about social media and tapping into this demographic-cornucopia, then you need not bother with it. You have to be intent on rising to its forefront. It’s either go big, or go home.
Tags: social media marketing
It’s the new television—Social Networks. At least that’s the comparison most vulnerable to being tossed around when describing its marketability. And it’s true. Not since the television has such a versatile medium surfaced. It has the ability to swallow large chunks of our lives, like television; it connects people on an emotional level, like television. But where it truly becomes the new television is in the cornucopia of advertising potential that websites like Facebook have managed to cram into every orifice of their network. By creating a forum for hundreds of millions of users to branch off into their own targeted, niche markets, social media sites become an undisputed wealth of marketing allure.
Their reach is absurd. In the United States, Facebook has attracted a membership of 22 million; 84 percent of whom are between the age of 14 and 26 and almost evenly distributed between the sexes. These are very appealing demographics that make Facebook’s Ad Serving System an enticing approach to targeting a specific audience.
Facebook’s Advertising Model = Promising ROIs
What brings Facebook to the forefront and sets it a tier higher than all of the other Social Media Networks is that its marketing potential is not confined to one or two fronts. Beside the Ad Serving System, a slew—thousands—of third-party applications have emerged to serve as extensions or meta-versions of preexisting web services; Wordpress and the now-defunct Scrabulous come to mind. While this is all fine and good for them, what does this mean to you, the advertiser? It is a fresh platform for branding. Many companies are already successfully doing it by developing their own fully functional tools for Facebook users to integrate into their profile page. And because the only cost is a few mouse clicks, there is nothing to really detract a potential client from installing and interacting with your application.
Facebook has transformed from a website for college students to share photographs into a multifaceted marketing tool for tapping into the website’s 62 million worldwide clientele. It is almost hard to believe that the rest of us were unable to see its potential earlier; before Microsoft did by investing 240 million into the company and estimating its worth at 15 billion. But by their spot-on forecasting and the promising evolution of social media networks in general, advertising on the web has become a more focused and humanized practice.
Tags: facebook, social media marketing
Nothing in optimizing a site for search engines happens quickly. The final result that most are looking for when optimizing a site is higher search engine rankings, and those can take months to develop, and the rest of your websites life to maintain.
Social bookmarking has allowed for a relatively quick fix in the SEO world. It does this by offering someone looking to optimize their pages a way to quickly build links and alert search engines of fresh content.
Bookmarking is the new force in inbound link building. Now instead of just creating link bait in terms of optimized content and waiting for someone to stumble upon it, you can break up your link bait into little packages and take it to your audiences door step. You are able to tell those linking to you what the content is, why it is important, and what keywords are related to it through the use of tags. Compelling content is still a must if you want to capture the exponential traffic and inbound links possible with social bookmarking, but now you do not need to have a large amount of traffic flowing through your site to get the links pointing to you.
Most social networks have a high PageRank with Google, and they are being spidered on almost a constant basis. This allows for your content to be indexed faster, and thus your valuable content can be seen by more people in a timely manner. This is key if you have time sensitive content you are trying to use to draw traffic. It is also important for search engines such as MSN that use a site’s “freshness” as a factor in their algorithm.
When all is said and done SEO is just a series of strategies to make sure your website gets the most traffic it possibly can. For this end result social bookmarking offers a quick fix. It can offer an instant stream of traffic, and give you fuel for a future of inbound links that will help increase your PageRank and search engine rankings.
Last week I had a meeting with Jeff Ramsey fom eMarketer and he shared some statistics that you may find interesting:
Blog stats:
Percent of Internet users that read blogs according to the diferent on-line research companies:
Forrester 10%
BIGresearch 13%
eMarketer 17%
Gallup Poll 20%
Harris/Makovsky 21%
JupiterKagan 22%
Princeton survey 27%
comScore 30%
Ipsos 32%
PEW 39%
Gallup Poll says:
9% read frequently
11% occasionally
3.6% trust blogs as a news source. (Source:Insight Express)
8% trust blogs when making a purchase. (Source:JupiterReseach)
9% trust Blogs as source of information about products (Source:Universal McCann/InsightExpress)
12% trust blogs always or most of the time (Source:Princeton Research Assoc)
38% of firms monitor Blogs (Source:Reveries.com)
And for Social Networking sites:
Percent of users going to social sites:
24% (Source:RBC CAPITAL)
25% (Source:Park Assoc)
33% are teens 12 to 17 years old (Source:Mindshare)
58% are young adults 18 to 24 (Source:RBCCapital)
US on-line Social Network Ad spending 2006, 2007 and 2010 (In Millions)
2006 $350
2007 $865
2010 $2,150
91% of medial buyers surveyed said they are NOT buying ads on social networking sites (Source:Deutsche bank/MedialPost survey, 2006)
19% of advertisers claim they have advertised on social networks but only 14% plan to in the next year. Source:American Advertising Federation 2006 survey)
79% of internet users do NOT trust product information they find on social networks. (Source:JupiterResearch)
60% of US internet users view online video on a monthly basis
US online Video Ad Spending (In Miilions)
2004 $135
2005 $225
2006 $410
2007 $775
2008 $1,300
2009 $2,000
2010 $2,900
You Tube audience:
54% 35 to 64 years old according to Nielsen/Net Ratings
100 million videos added every day
(Source of information is noted if not the source was direct from emarketer)
Tags: social media marketing, statistics
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