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Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category
Social Media & Pre-Sliced American Cheese
A lot can be said about how we portray ourselves and our businesses through social media channels. Some advisers will recommend not to post anything that may alienate your audience (the “pre-sliced American cheese” or “greatest common denominator” philosophy).
But there is more to social media than being non-offensive or inclusive. The trick is to be non-offensive, inclusive AND CON¬CURRENTLY: interesting, available, current, occasionally funny, informative, and not-too-busy-to-pay-attention-but-not-too-idle-to-over post. Oh, and ditch the social media ‘I just opened my account’ generic page/avatar uniform as soon as you can (Need help? Give us a buzz).
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For those companies trying to figure out how to use emerging and popular social media as part of a new business model, General Motors may have found the answer.
The automaker giant, looking for new and cutting edge ways to connect with current customers and improve customer relations, has embraced Twitter and Facebook to connect directly with GM auto owners experiencing issues.
GM has created a team to scour Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks for comments related to GM cars and issues. The team contacts the poster, opens a dialogue about the issue referenced in the status update or post and tries to find an answer for car troubles the user is experiencing. This extends to cars and trucks far beyond their warranty expiration, and has already been a pleasant surprise for many GM owners.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Alternatively, I could go look up your restaurant on Yelp and not get fooled at all.
Yelp is a website with social aspects that allows people to rate and write reviews for stores, restaurants, bars, hair salons, barbers, dentists, doctors and pretty much any business I’ve missed. You can look a place up to find reviews and leave a review after you’ve been to a place. That’s the whole premise.
Go ahead, Google your company‘s name — do you like the results?
Organizations undergoing redesigns recognize the importance of their online presence, and managing it has become a full-time career for many. What’s the advantage of rooting social media directly into your website, anyway? Shouldn’t it be enough to show up in Google search results?
One advantage is centralizing and confirming all sources of your company’s online presence. This recognition enforces an image of complete transparency. Users need to know if they can trust you. They want to see how you interact with the public. By placing links to Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. on your site, you’re showing you’ve got nothing to hide.
Barack Obama raised $500 million from his online campaign, garnering a total of 5 million fans on social media sites. Dell used Twitter to sell $3 million worth of computers with over 600,000 followers. Clearly, these are some extreme examples of hard return on investment.
Social media ROI has been largely overlooked by businesses, as a study by Mzina and Babson Executive Education revealed. Eighty-four percent of professionals worldwide don’t measure the ROI of their social media programs, while 40 percent weren’t even sure if they could track ROI with their social media tools.
In spring of this year, Facebook started allowing Facebook pages to be customized more heavily with Facebook Markup language (FBML). This customization allows for greater control of messaging on a company or organization’s Facebook Page.
Toys R Us has provided an example of a particularly shrewd deployment of this functionality with a Black Friday-specific Facebook Page offering. The page gives a preview of the Black Friday promotions Toys R Us will be running, but only to fans of the page. Users can then click through to Toys R Us’ main site.
Have you ever done something you wish you could undo? Wouldn’t life be grand if, at the touch of a button, we could unsay that embarrassing remark, unmake that last minute u-turn or uneat that double cheeseburger? Of course it would. It is empowering and oh-so delightfully passive aggressive that you could publicly, but with no direct interaction, terminate the friendship with any person that displeases or offends you.
This dream of being impervious to the actual consequences of ending a relationship has brought rise to the term “unfriend”. In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary named this little public breakup the word of the year.
For those not in the know, the term refers to the action of removing a contact, or friend, from those amassed in any online social network a user has joined. For example, if an old eighth grade schoolmate of yours happens to profess their love for John Mayer and you do not like it: One click – Unfriend. You just let the masses know “I hate John Mayer and all of his minions,” and you’ll never hear about it again. At least not from that guy. This action of unloading folks from your digital social circle is applicable across most social networks.
By itself, the word ‘peace’ seems convoluted and unreachable. Sure, the idea of world peace is great, but just like Rome, peace can’t be achieved in a day.
Media Genesis partnered with UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to create and launch a website – www.ThePowerofPeaceNetwork.com. The website uses technology as a vehicle for spreading messages of peace, while functioning as a social network to start discussions.
Now we need your help to continue the discussion. We want to hear your thoughts – whether it be about larger issues such as climate change and poverty, or simply what you are doing in your own community to inspire peace and mutual understanding. (more…)
As humanity continues to trend away from such oddities as spending time with each other, a new trend is emerging. No longer is television the undisputed king of making people sit idle. In fact, companies in Great Britain are actually spending more money online for advertising than they are for television. Yet, at least in America, online advertising is down.
So what does this mean for you? Online advertising isn’t even remotely trending toward being useless. You don’t even have to be smarter about it; a lot of that decrease is probably due to capacity cuts and huge expenditure decreases more generally. That said, more profit is good, and, with keywords costing more and more on Google, greater bang for your buck may be had in the social media realm. Nielsen reports that advertising on social media networks is up 119% from last year. The same study says people are spending 17% of their time online on social networks.
Think about that. When people are on a social network, what state of mind are they usually in? They might be using it for work, sure, but most of the time they’re bored and just killing time. Not exactly busy, you could say. Add to that, they put their demographic information in their profile. Does this get easier?
Bottom line: Strongly consider allocating more of your online advertising budget toward social media advertising. Depending on your demographic, this could be a no-brainer.
Name-squatting has been a sneaky and shameful practice that has existed with Web domains as long as they have been around. This is when individuals or third parties purchase random domain names in hopes that somebody will want to purchase them someday. If that actually happens, then they will ask for up to $3,500 or more for a domain name that usually sells for $10. Although this can be obnoxious or annoying, there are ways around it, especially with trademarked names. Social media websites, however, are a different story.
