How to Promote Your Business on Flickr

by Rohit Bhargava
reposted from Open Forum

Flickr offers one of the largest image archives and communities online and one that is often not targeted because most small businesses aren't yet good at creating the one thing they need to have credibility in Flickr ... high quality non-marketing images.

This is a big deal because Flickr is not just a community of photos, it is a community where high quality photography is appreciated. Sure, people use Flickr to share their point and shoot photos with family, but the power users of Flickr and the communities that you would care about as a marketer are usually looking at very high quality images.

So before you try to use any of the techniques in this insiders guide, you need to make sure your photographs are actually good enough to bother. Assuming they are, here are a few tips for how you might use Flickr for marketing

Share quality photos – As mentioned above, the most important tip when it comes to Flickr is to actually share good photography. This doesn’t mean going out and getting a professional photographer. Those images are great for your website, but Flickr works best when you share more authentic “real life” photos. To take great ones, you may want to upgrade your point and shoot to a real Digital SLR camera with a high quality lens. With photography, the quality of your camera can often be the only change you need to make to dramatically improve your photos.

Go Pro - Getting a Flickr "Pro" account is like the green fees in golf. Of course, you can upload up to 200 images for free and have an account without paying, but you don't get the "pro" icon next to your name and your account doesn't have the same authority for members of the community. If you are going to use Flickr to do any marketing, put up the 25 bucks and get yourself a pro account. (PS - I'm not getting any commission from anyone for telling you that!)

Create collection homepages - Flickr photos are arranged into sets and collections. Sets are like photo galleries or albums, and collections group various photo albums together. As you organize your photos, think about how to make each set about a certain them, and then group them together into collections. Once you have a collection homepage, this can be the public URL that you send people to. This way, you could use the same URL even while you add new galleries to the collection each day.

Think thumbnails - Sets, collections and individual images are represented by thumbnails. These are the visual elements that need to engage someone before they are inspired to click and delve further into your account. When you take and crop your photos, paying attention to how the thumbnails look matters. More importantly, whenever you create a new set the thumbnail is set by the first image. Make sure you change it to the one that offers the most compelling reason to click and see the rest of the set.

Tag properly - Tagging sometimes seems like the online equivalent of going to the dentist, you know you should do it but always manage to put it off in place of doing something else first. On Flickr, tags are a big reason that people can find images and tagging yours properly is a necessary step. Use the right descriptive keywords, but also check and see what people are already searching for and see if any of those tags may apply to your images. Aside from direct links, many of your image views on Flickr will likely come from people searching for these tags.

Share real time - One of the most powerful benefits of Flickr is that when you are at an event or something current that people are likely to care about in a particular timeframe, speed of getting photos online matters. If you have a blog, configure it to work with Flickr. If you are using a computer, use the Flickr Uploadr tool to get your images online faster. The closer to your event you can get your photos up, the more likely it is that people will use them to refer to, share with others and drive traffic to.

Join and contribute to groups - No matter what you are taking pictures of, chances are there is a Flickr group with others who are already sharing photos of it. People who are active in Flickr groups tend to also be some of Flickr's most active (and often influential) members. As a result, joining groups not only lets you be part of a greater community and conversation on a certain theme, it can often give you a direct connection to Flickr users who really matter. Remember, what you post into a group must be relevant and on topic or else you risk alienating yourself and your brand.

Actively promote and approve reuse - Lots of services, bloggers and media are now using Flickr images to power their own stories and media. Once you start getting your imagery noticed, you will likely start to receive invitations for permission to reuse your photos. This means your photos are gaining traction. Try to approve the requests quickly and encourage more people to use your images ... and credit you properly for them, of course.

Enable stats - Flickr has a great tool which allows you to get deeper metrics on your photos. With these stats, you can see which ones of your photos proved to be the most popular or shared from person to person, and also what sites are driving people to your photo collections.

Keep going – Once you start using Flickr to promote your business, the toughest thing can be to keep uploading good content. Doing this means that you need to treat almost every event as a chance to create more images for your gallery, from participating in conferences to everyday life. If you start to use Flickr for marketing, your ongoing challenge will be to avoid having one big spike and then no more activity.

What Can Businesses Do On Facebook?

by Barbara Wayman

reposted with permission

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”   --Putt’s Law

It’s here: the new age of social media. By now you probably know that you can use Facebook to reconnect with old friends from high school, post photos and catch up on what your friends are doing, but did you know there are a lot of business goals you can accomplish on Facebook as well?

Here are my top four things businesses can do on Facebook:

1. Prospect for clients – People can be searched and segmented by narrow topic areas on social media, making it efficient to prospect for clients who may already have an interest in your product or service. Because in social media people opt in to join your group or become a fan of your company, you also have the benefit of a more motivated, interested audience than you might have in the offline world.

2. Listen to what people are saying/thinking about your company, industry and brand – You can use that information to develop new products and services that will appeal to your customers or to refine the products and services you currently have.

3. Develop better customer relations – By engaging more frequently with your customers in a way they enjoy and prefer, you strengthen the bonds between you.

4. Build your credibility and expertise – By being visible and active on social media, you increase the likelihood that when people think of your industry they think of you first.

Notice one thing I didn’t say was SELL, SELL, SELL. Social media has the potential to reach a huge potential market, but that doesn’t mean you immediately should sell to everyone in your network. That can be a real turn off and lead to people disconnecting from you online because it is so self-serving.

It’s like if you went to a party or networking event and you met some new people. You wouldn’t immediately whip out your product and ask them to buy it, right? Instead you might chat with them to get a better idea of their areas of interest and their needs, and if there seemed to be an overlap with what you were offering, you might give them your card and suggest they visit your company. It’s the same thing online. You need to build the relationships before people want to buy from you.

Facebook is great for building the know, like and trust factor that is so important for long-term success. Because since social media is so new there are people out there pushing their products in a very aggressive way, and it might make you think that’s an appropriate strategy. It’s not.

That doesn’t mean social media won’t help you sell your services, you just need to think of it with a longer timeline and in a more subtle way, compared to, “Okay I’ve set up my Facebook page so now I expect to see a 20% boost in sales this month.”

Facebook can be an important marketing tool for businesses when it is used effectively with reasonable goals.

Barbara Wayman, president of BlueTree Media, LLC, publishes The Stand Out Newsletter, an award-winning ezine for people who want to know how to leverage the power of marketing and public relations. Get your free subscription today at www.bluetreemedia.com /ezine.html

©2009 Barbara Wayman, BlueTree Media, LLC

For more information there was also a great story in The New York Times last week on this same exact topic!

7 Ways to Get More Out of LinkedIn

by Sharlyn Lauby

reposted from Mashable

LinkedIn, which recently reached the 50 million user milestone, has long been considered the social networking site for professionals. If you’re in business, it is basically expected that you have a profile there.


But with the more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook being used for business purposes, some professionals are neglecting their LinkedIn profiles. While LinkedIn is certainly not as dynamic as other social media sites, it still provides a lot of value — if you use it correctly. So whether you’re new to LinkedIn or a veteran, here are some of the things you should consider incorporating into your LinkedIn strategy.

1. Include a Photo Avatar
Some media reports claim that because organizations can use any criteria they want to make hiring decisions, photo avatars provide companies with information they may not have otherwise known about you based on a resume alone and could actually hurt you more than help. But, not including a photo with a social networking profile flies in the face of conventional wisdom when your goal is to build relationships and community.

Eric B. Meyer, an associate in the labor and employment group of Dilworth Paxson LLP, reminds us that when using a professional networking site such as LinkedIn, “don’t give a potential employer an easy excuse to remove you from consideration. Use a professional headshot and scrap the picture of you doing a keg-stand"

He adds that, “an employer may not discriminate when selecting one job applicant over another. For example, an employer may not base a hiring decision on such things as race, religion, gender, and national origin. Although actually proving an employer made a discriminatory hiring decision may be difficult.” Businesses who engage in hiring discrimination are the exception, not the rule. Just remember, by using an avatar, you will be providing information about yourself a prospective employer may not have otherwise obtained on its own.

2. Build Your Network of Connections
While we might be inclined to say quality is better than quantity, it could be possible that the number of connections you have says something about you. Greg Koutsis, corporate and international channel recruiter for Aplicor LLC, says, “if someone has 20-50+ connections then I know they probably check LinkedIn at least once a week. If someone has 1-19 then I realize they probably either haven’t begun to pop the hood and look inside or gotten past the initial threshold of their friends, family and past colleagues. They might be a great prospect for me to reach out to but this might not be the best use of my time. This combined with the profile they have listed lets me realize quickly if I am wasting my time with someone who has no interest or trust in LinkedIn.”
So you might say to yourself, if small numbers in the connection department signal you’re a novice, do large numbers mean you’ll connect with just about anyone? Koutsis says not necessarily. “I do not believe there’s a maximum number of connections that makes someone look like they will just connect with anyone. LinkedIn only shows 500 then adds the + sign after the 500 so you never really do know how many more than 500 connections someone has until you connect with them.”

3. Use Status Updates to Your Advantage
Once you complete your profile, there aren’t a lot of places to make regular updates in LinkedIn. The one space where you can keep your connections informed is the status updates section.

Lori Burke, director of human resources at Neighborhood America, explains that updates are not only an interesting read, but very valuable. “I’ve found new networking groups I may not have thought about [via status updates]. Additionally, it allows me to learn what others are involved with or in, who they may be connected to, etc. In total, it widens the scope of knowledge for me.”

4. Seek Meaningful Recommendations
A terrific feature of LinkedIn is the ability to provide recommendations. This is a place for your connections to comment about your work. Recommendations can be thought of as beefed up thank you cards. Instead of telling one person how you feel, you’re telling the world that person does good work.
It’s important to get good solid recommendations and Meyer offers some thoughts on how to do that. First, “think about who knows you best. It could be a co-worker or manager. It could also be a client or customer for whom you just did an incredible job on a huge project. If you seek a recommendation from a client or customer, be polite and remember to thank the person who gives you the recommendation.”

Then, “If you are going to seek a recommendation from a co-worker or manager, keep a few things in mind. Many employers have written policies against giving out anything other than neutral job references to current and former employees. These policies generally focus on giving recommendations, as opposed to seeking them. Still, as a courtesy to the person in your company from whom you seek a recommendation, just be sensitive to your company’s neutral reference policy.”

5. Optimize Your Profile
Your LinkedIn profile should not just be an online version of your resume, optimizing for search engines is key. The format of your LinkedIn profile might depend on whether you are currently employed and whether or not you are seeking new opportunities, says Koutsis. “If you are looking for a new position then you might want your profile to look more like a resume, but maybe not so much if I am currently employed.”
Burke doesn’t mind if the full content of the resume is on the profile as it can be helpful when searching for candidates. However, it is a bonus “when I find networkers who have added more content than you might find in a resume, such as a link to their portfolio.”

When filling out your profile, you should think about your goals for the type of networking you hope to get done. Also, since LinkedIn has the ability to search any word in the content, both Burke and Koutsis suggest listing all relevant keywords at the bottom of your profile if you want to be found easier.

6. Use Groups to Expand Your Reach
Groups are a beneficial networking tool and a great way to expand your network. Koutsis says that he doesn’t look at what groups a person belongs to when he’s searching for candidates but he does find potential resources using the groups function.

However, Meyer reminds us it’s possible to be viewed in a negative light based upon group membership. “For some time now, many employers are going beyond simply running a criminal background check in order to vet job applicants. Employers may be Googling candidates, checking out their public postings on Facebook, reviewing tweets on Twitter, and scrutinizing LinkedIn profiles. In a down economy — as in any economy, really — employers want to fill job openings with the best possible candidates.”

Today’s rule of thumb should be that anything you post in an online profile may as well be listed on your resume or bio. If you belong to a LinkedIn group that is inconsistent with the business image you wish to portray, then that could be a challenge for you. Meyer shared with me the example of belonging to a group called “The Deer Hunters” while applying for a position with an animal rights group (let’s just say, good luck with that).

7. Consider Whether to Link Your Profiles
Burke believes that accounts should be kept separate. “I believe that this strategy allows me to keep my professional personae separate from my personal. Case in point was the one time I posted a social media article to both applications. My Facebook family and friends found the information of little value to them and I believe the same may be true in reverse. However, I will post general information about me (i.e., speaking engagements) with both networks. In essence, it depends on the content,” she says.

On the other hand, Lance Haun, vice president of outreach at MeritBuilder, explains that LinkedIn is “a snapshot of your life at the time you updated your profile so including Twitter, Facebook, or a blog helps to add living context to your profile.” With the lines between work and life being blurred, posting something business related at 1:00 PM and a picture of a cat at 1:00 AM helps “bring the picture of a person together completely.”

In the end, Koutsis asks, “if people see no reason after viewing your profile to connect with you, then why did you reach out to them in the first place?” The most important thing we can do is create a complete and compelling profile. Because the bottom line is the value proposition you propose when you try to connect with someone on LinkedIn.

5 Ways To Use Twitter's New List Feature For Marketers

By Rohit Bhargava
reposted from Influential Marketing Blog


There is no denying that Twitter has had a huge impact on how marketers are thinking about using social media tools for marketing. One thing that is most interesting about it, however, is how the site has managed to avoid overcomplicating itself with more features. Twitter is simple, and it just works. Of course the one overused word that has been used recently to describe Twitter is that it is a "firehose" of information, shooting out at a speed and volume that has threatened to make it unusable for many people. So when I had a chance to try out Twitter's new Lists feature (which I had been looking forward to seeing for some time), I was not only surprised, but also excited about what this will mean for all of us who use the site. Here are just a few reasons why I think lists may revolutionize how you use Twitter.
1.You can segment your firehose. The #1 criticism of Twitter is that if you follow thousands of people and see all their tweets appearing in one interface, it's tough to manage. Searches in third party tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck have made this more manageable, but those usually only work based on keywords, which is inefficient. What if I wanted to just see all the tweets from my colleagues at Ogilvy? That was tough to do. Now with lists, I can create my own group of colleagues and just reference that.

2.Offers a more meaningful metric of influence. You'll notice if you have a Twitter account that in the spot where it used to just list the number of tweets you have done, it now shows how frequently you are "listed." This is a new metric of influence that sits somewhere between followers and retweets - but one that indicates how frequently other Twitter users who are creating their own lists are including you on their list. In short order, I imagine that number (along with retweets) will become more influential than having hundreds of thousands of robot followers when it comes to measuring influence on Twitter.

3.Allows you to easily follow a trusted group of individuals. One of the biggest issues I have had in the past with Twitter is that it is difficult to follow a group of users all at once. Of course, you used to be able to use services like Tweepml to do this, but that was incomplete and the lists were often anonymously posted and so the data may not be as trustworthy. Now with Twitter Lists, you can create a list of all the attendees at a particular conference, for example, and with one click anyone can follow them.

4.Lets any user of Twitter segment who they actually read. Up until now, the greatest compliment you could give someone who you follow and read on Twitter was to retweet something they posted. Now with Twitter Lists, you can add them to a list and not only make your own experience of reading content on Twitter better (see #1 on this list), but you can also send a subtle reminder to the person you are following that unlike the other thousands of accounts you might follow, their's is one you actually pay attention to.

5.Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Many brands have multiple accounts - for example hotel brands that have a master account and then separate accounts for separate regional properties. This phenomenon was becoming more widespread, but now with Twitter Lists, brands can aggregate all their accounts together in a list - and best of all, if each Twitter account does this, the lists will show up on the sidebar linking anyone who sees one branded account to all the others.

Clearly, I'm excited about what Twitter Lists has to offer for marketers. What do you think - is this a big deal for marketers or for anyone else?
PS - Follow me on Twitter at @rohitbhargava

STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me

by Jennifer Van Grove (re-posted from Mashable)

Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.

After dissecting over 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users’ status updates the professors concluded that 80% of users are “meformers,” or “Me Now” status updaters.

Meformers are “people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts, and emotions.” The rest (20%) are informers who use the channels to share informational updates like links news articles.

The rest of the story and the study can be found here.

Guess Who's Posting On PR Breakfast Club?

If you guessed me, you'd be right. My first post went up yesterday: PR TimeWarp: The Palace. Okay, so the title could be better but I'm just getting warmed up. What I am trying to do is examine the roots of Web 2.0 back from when the Web was just getting launched. There were many early seeds of social networking and interactivity in the initial launch of the Web and commercialization of the Internet. So, if you can come up with a better name for the series, feel free to comment or send me an email.

I am working on more pieces as we speak, so stay tuned.

The Overlooked Side of Social Media

Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management

By The Staff of the Corporate Executive Board

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

Unfortunately, few have thought very hard about managing these initiatives. In a classic case or "ready, fire, aim," companies are committing resources to social media efforts with very little process behind them. The result? A hodgepodge of unrelated initiatives, wheels re-invented and resources wasted.

The Corporate Executive Board has found that the best companies recognize that social media are just another set of promising tools and as such are to be understood, mastered, and used efficiently. Importantly, they also recognize that how they manage their social media efforts depends on where they are in the journey from initial discovery to mainstream use. That journey has three stages:

• Discovery: At this stage, the organization is just finding out about the potential uses (and risks) of social media for its purposes and making initial forays. The goal: understanding ("could this work for us?"). Since few resources are necessary at this point, companies don't need heavy managerial oversight. But they do need downside protection. Clear, well-communicated policies on everything from information sharing to appropriate language is in order.

• Experimentation: As an organization does more with social media, the importance of learning efficiently becomes urgent. At this point, companies need tighter oversight and coordination of efforts. There are a number of ways to create that kind of transparency and sharing, ranging from steering committees to tiger teams" to social media czars. These bodies should develop and steward a learning agenda for the firm's efforts, using each initiative to deliberately increase the institutional knowledge of social media use.

Measurement standards also become more important at this stage. The best companies settle on a consistent set of measures for similar initiatives, using that data to test and learn over time. Metrics like track-backs, for example, can clarify better or worse social media vehicles for a given objective.

• Adoption: While few companies currently find themselves in this stage, those that do loosen their managerial posture, moving away from oversight toward support. Here, the role of any central or dedicated management body should be one of education, coaching and provision of expertise. Some firms are building centers of excellence, repositories of people and knowledge about using social media. Metrics should shift here too, tailored for assessing efficiency and effectiveness of specific initiatives.

The short story: Social media isn't a fad about to fade away; it's a good idea for your organization to learn how to use it to your advantage. The best companies will learn faster and get more out of social media by aggressively managing their efforts.

How To: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business

by Josh Catone
Reprinted from Mashable

If you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (”#”) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a “hashtag,” and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies. In fact, hashtags were first popularized during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.

You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.

How to Utilize Existing Hashtags
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Because hashtags tend to spread so quickly and because Twitter users often search hashtags for content from people they aren’t following, using hashtags can be a great way to extend your reach on Twitter and connect with your current audience in a more meaningful way. There are a wide variety of already established hashtags — and new ones being created daily — that you can join. You need to be careful, however, that your use of hashtags is consistent with both your brand and the tag itself.

Unfortunately, as hashtags have become more popular, they’ve also become a vehicle for spam. You should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, and you should never stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results. Proper etiquette dictates that you should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

So which tags should you participate in? That depends wholly on your business and your purpose for using Twitter. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to participate in the #robotpickuplines hashtag if you own a health club and use your Twitter account to offer customer service to members. But if you own a record shop, you’ll more than likely want to join in the #musicmonday hashtag, in which people tweet about what music they’re listening to and suggest other musically-inclined users to follow every Monday. Or if you own a restaurant, why not tweet out your specials or
some recipes on #tastytuesday.

Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend?, a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business. Also, pay attention to tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. If it makes sense for your business to jump on board, compose tweets that are on topic and compatible with that hashtag.

How to Start Your Own Hashtags
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While you certainly shouldn’t use hashtags to describe all of your tweets, they can be very helpful for small businesses as a way to track social media campaigns or create memes that help establish a sense of community and build your company’s mindshare among your core customers. The first step in creating a hashtag is deciding on the tag word itself. You should pick something memorable, easy to spell, and perhaps more importantly, as short as possible. Remember that Twitter gives everyone just 140 characters per tweet, so no one wants half of it to be taken up by an unwieldy hashtag.

Once you’ve figured out the tag itself, the next step is simple: start using it and promoting it. Make sure your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile and add something of value to the conversation. Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag via other social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter. Tweet out calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals (but don’t overdo it!). For example, let’s say you own a bookstore, and you’re running a Twitter contest to give out a gift card to your store. Your explanatory tweet might be something like, “What’s your favorite summer reading material? Tweet using #beachreads to win a $100 gift certificate to Al’s World of Books!”

How to Keep Track of Hashtags
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Of course, now that you have people using your new hashtag, you need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the easiest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search. You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results. Monitter and TweetGrid are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.

You can also use the built-in search functionality of popular desktop clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, or set up alerts on business-oriented Twitter dashboards such as HootSuite or CoTweet.

The Science Of ReTweets

View more presentations from Dan Zarrella.

What A Camp Counselor Can Teach You about Social Media

by David Berkowitz
reposted from MediaPost's Social Media Insider Blog

One of the hardest jobs I ever had was working as a day camp counselor, spending eight summers straight at Beth El Summer Session in New Rochelle, NY. While it's been a few years since I wore a T-shirt and swimsuit to work every day, seeing all the kids home from camp swarming around Madison Square Park this week brought back a few memories. It also made me realize how relevant a lot of what I learned in that job is to what I'm doing now.

Here are some of the lessons I still carry with me. They should be especially relevant to social marketing practitioners today.

The rest of the story can be found here.

13 Things to Do on Twitter Besides Tweet

Tired of delivering the typical stream of status updates on Twitter? Why not try some of the following ideas for other things you can do with the service?

Thanks to an open API and a philosophy of interconnectivity, Twitter’s vast array of third-party services has you covered on a number of alternative uses for the famed microblogging tool.

There is more information on each of the these and the complete article on Mashable.

1. Share Files
2. Exchange Business Cards
3. Share Music
4. Share Images
5. Share Videos
6. Raise Money
7. Lobby for Healthcare Reform
8. Screencast
9. Play Games
10. Social Bookmarking
11. Be Someone Else
12. Start a Petition
13. Find a Job.

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

reposted from Socialnomics -- Social Media Blog

Here are some great stats. All the sources are listed on the Socialnomics site after the story posting.

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers.

A Marketer's Guide To Being Anti-Social Online

posted by Rohit Bhargava (reprinted from Influential Marketing Blog, with permission)

Everyone wants you to be social. If you're a marketer, you have heard about a million times in recent weeks, months and years about the power and necessity of social media. Get a blog, get on Twitter, create a fan page ... every piece of advice seems to point towards being more social, more open and more transparent. Let's take a deep breath together. This post is not the kind of advice you'd expect to get from a "social media guy" like me. In fact, it's downright antisocial. To put it more accurately, it is about the right times to be anti-social.

This is a strange post when many brands are struggling right now to even find the right ways to be social online. Engaging with social media is an imperative for most brands (though the way you do it can and should vary greatly depending on your business and goals). There is plenty of good advice online for how to do this well, though. I like to think I have shared a decent amount of this type of advice here on this blog. But as marketers we also want to avoid the landmines. The situations or instances in social media that may be likely to blow up in our faces. Those are often the situations where being anti-social is the best strategy.

Here are a few situations and pieces of advice I have gathered on how to be anti-social online and help your brand succeed at the same time:

NEVER allow YouTube comments. I have had the opinion for some time now that allowing people to comment on your YouTube videos without moderating is an idiotic thing for a brand to do. Why? Because the vast majority of YouTube comments lack substance, include uninformed or somehow offensive remarks, and offer little context or real discussion. Instead, if you want to foster dialogue on your videos, create a video blog and embed the video into the blog. Then allow people to comment on the video in the blog. This will generally result in far higher quality comments, and less infantile useless banter.

DON'T friend/follow everyone. As a brand, the temptation is to friend and follow everyone who contacts you or requests to be your friend. Resist that temptation, and instead make it the job of someone on your team to actively monitor these requests and approve them based on criteria that you set. This criteria can be lax (not a robot account) to more specific to your industry or area of concentration. The effort will pay off, though, when it comes to using a particular social network as a marketing platform and tool for collaboration because you will only be talking to people who really matter.

MODERATE your profiles actively. What is written online is not written in stone, and as a brand you have the right to set the ground rules for your own profiles and sites online. What this requires is clearly posting your policy about what is ok and what is not ok for people to post and share in your environments. This doesn't mean to try and delete anything negative or critical ... but off topic or offensive comments or posts can and should be moderated. And in cases where people are posting incorrect or flawed information, you have a right and obligation to correct them (but allow their comment to be posted if it meets your criteria).

SEPARATE private content. There are legitimate reasons why you might want to share brand content among a small subset of users or internal users online. Just because content is online doesn't mean that everything needs to be open and public. If you feel you have a legitimate reason for sharing password protected private content, you should do it. And if it is extremely sensitive, make sure you take the right steps to protect it and prevent it from getting in the wrong hands.

PROMOTE yourself and your brand. Part of the benefit of using social media is that it does allow you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons. The fact is, if you are using social media in an authentic and not overly promotional way on a daily basis, you can earn the right to share marketing information at various points and not lose your audience. The real trick is to strike the right balance.

Rohit Bhargava is the force behind the Influential Marketing Blog and is the award winning author of Personality Not Included.

How Starbucks makes money from 3.8 million Facebook fans

Posted by Melissa Allison (reprinted from seattletimes.com)


Starbucks passed Coca-Cola last month as the most popular brand on Facebook, according to InsideFacebook.com, and plans to leverage those and other digital relationships during this fall's national rollout of its instant coffee, Via, BrandWeek reports. (StarbucksGossip.com posts say the launch begins Sept. 1.)

Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks' digital strategy director, tells BrandWeek that the chain relied heavily on digital channels to promote its Free Pastry Day last month. Nearly 600,000 people RSVP'd for that event on Facebook. "That was a digital and PR effort we would say is widely successful," Wheeler said. Almost a million people RSVP'd "yes" or "maybe" to its promotion last holiday season with Product (Red) to contribute 5 cents for every beverage purchased to the AIDS-fighting project.

"Facebook has been really great about it. They are thrilled with the success," she said. "They have lots of other brands. [Our success has them now asking,] 'How can we even do this? How can we repeat the success for them?' It speaks to the power of the Starbucks brand and how well it connects with our consumer in this space."

How to Archive Your Tweets

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days

ReadWriteWeb has the latest on how to archive those tweets.

Twitter Lessons from the British Government

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments

Twitter Is Great But It's Still Not The Phone

In case none of you know, I'm tracybb on Twitter. And for months, I have fruitlessly been applying to contests on Twitter. Most of these involve winning an iPhone and since I still have an old school phone, that prize sounds great to me. I tweet for moonfruit, or other silly things, in hopes of that elusive iPhone.

The other day, at the last possible second, I saw a posting on Facebook for a contest to be a TJ (Twitter Jockey) for the twiistup event. Tweet your reason why you should be the twitter jockey by 1 pm that day. It was about 10 at the time. Since the event was currently out of my budget (but I REALLY wanted to go), I decided to apply. Instead of being cutesy or trying to be funny, I just typed up a few reasons why I should be picked and sent it off.*

Previously, I would furiously check the sites to see if I'd won the prize. But this time, I promptly forgot. I don't seem to win these contests anyway. Oh, and I had my TweetDeck open all that day. But SOMEHOW, through all those annoying beeps on my TweetDeck, I missed the tweet that I had actually won! Me! It was me!

I check my many email boxes (yes, I have several, don't you?) all day long. I have Facebook open all day long. I have my phone at my side. But somehow, I missed it. When I get a direct message on Twitter, I get an email alert and it tells me the message. But when you just get an @ reply, there is no message. I don't really check my @ replies and the twitter user interface doesn't show them that easily either. So, I missed @socialmediaclub's tweet. Didn't even notice it on TweetDeck, as I have set up several filters of my own.

But, here's the rub. My Twitter profile has my URL on it. My site has all my contact information including my phone number, my email address, my Facebook page, even my business address. I could be contacted in a multitude of ways. Twitter was still not effective enough to reach me. I got the message a day too late, sort of like Morse code.

Ironically, I actually learned about the contest on Social Media Club's Facebook page. So, if they had contacted me that way, I'd have been a twittering fool. As I mentioned, I'm parked on Facebook all day and find that interface much easier to follow -- and they send me constant emails all day so I'm sure not miss one thing from my friends.

While people may mock the phone, it is still one of our best social media tools. It is instant messaging without the carpel tunnel. You not only get instant feedback but hearing a voice is more personal. If only I'd gotten a call.



* The winning tweet: @socialmediaclub: TJ me. Reasons: cute, concise, good writer, tech & social savvy, know the players (by name), local, and not shy. Please!
9:58 AM Jul 29th from TweetDeck

If you can't fight 'em

If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. But where to start? PR has been evolving and changing with technology since there was such a thing. I'm sure press releases weren't always faxed before there was a fax machine!

I have been in the PR business for 15 years and when I began, most publicists were still using blast fax to get their releases out to reporters. Or, in some cases, even mailing them! I was an early adopter to the Internet, however, and from almost the inception of my career I have been working with Internet companies and using the Internet to publicize them. I worked for InterActive Agency in Los Angeles before anyone knew what "interactive" even meant. Those were the good old days when you could just get press about a company launching a Web site.

But times have changed. Now, you have to fight for every column inch you can get, cyber or otherwise. So it's important to keep up with all the newest tools. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, how do you fit all these things into your PR plans and budgets? What role do bloggers play? Is Second Life significant? There are constantly new platforms emerging and others on the wane.

Well, now there is a way to keep up with them here. I hope to aggregate all the best content on social media right here on this site, along with basic tutorials on how to use the technologies (with a slant toward PR and marketing). I'm also going to post information on free or low cost webinars and real life seminars to teach social media practices. And just like the social media sites themselves, I hope that this blog will be constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the industry. One thing that will probably remain true is that social media marketing has become part of the fabric of public relations. So it's time to join the ranks!

Social Media Education

Well, in case you haven't heard, social media is all the rave. What, you don't know anything about social media? What is social media? According to Wikipedia (which is in itself a form of social media), "Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings....Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC)...."

Wikipedia also cites social media software applications including blogs (like this one), microblogs (Twitter), social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn), photo sharing (Flickr).

So, for those of you that are unfamiliar with this new revolution, here is a crash course on some best practices. I have made a list of some of the best articles I have found on the subject (most of them are lists themselves). I hope you find it helpful too.

• Five Easy Ways to Find People with Similar Interests on Twitter
• How to Be a LinkedIn Superstar
• Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education
• CNN, MTV Rank Among Top 10 Most Social Brands
• Kevin Rose: 10 Ways to Increase your Twitter Followers
• Social Media and Traditional Business Mores
• An Insiders Guide to Marketing on Flickr

By the way, these are all from blogs.