Archive for category Social Media
Twitter to FB to website – a practical example of social media at work!
Posted by David Harrison in Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Useful Stuff on August 27th, 2010
I was looking at my Tweetdeck this sunny (it still exists!) Friday and saw we had been retweeted by someone from Canada, so I went to their site from the link, read their comments on FB pages and instantly changed ours on Morello … I’ll also let you guys know their site address http://bit.ly/8X9dmt … so they get an extra link into their site, you guys get to read something good on Social Media and I feel happy because I have shared something useful.
Everybody wins!
The importance of social media to any e-commerce business
Posted by Paul McSweeney in E-Commerce, Facebook, Social Commerce, Social Media, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions on August 27th, 2010
We have all seen the explosion of corporations creating online communities, but let us take a look at how easy it can be to connect with your e-commerce customers and how important social media is to your customers.
First, we have to ask the question, how do you take the seemingly limitless social media conversations and turn them into actionable insights? Also, how can you understand what is being said and the context of those conversations?
Social media in any context offers incredibly good (and free) feedback on a variety of goods and services. Online Retailers need to use this information to their advantage. Using it to your advantage means using both the good and bad comments. Here are some practical tips we can take a look at. Most importantly, keep the conversation going and make sure your social media content is relevant and current. Do remember that the end goal is product sales and customer connections. Also, rekindle the passion for your brand consistently using social media methods. For example, if you a leading e-commerce website and you are involved in a social media forum, why not hold weekly or bi-weekly chat sessions about the experiences with ordering product via your site? You will get invaluable responses from doing something like this.
It is also very important to constantly think about the audience you are trying to go after, consider your age demographics, race, and gender as well. Who are the most likely people to purchase your products and who do you want to expand to? These are key points to remember when considering your marketplace.
It is really no surprise that online e-commerce businesses were one of the first groups to use social media to make their brand more social. They enabled customers to find out what their peers were thinking and provided valuable insight that could be viewed in “real time”.
Building a truly interactive social media community within an e-commerce platform is important as it creates a more efficient retail environment where customer opinions, relevant content and product information are freely distributed. It is only then that “social commerce” can happen.
To accomplish this, retailers must be able to integrate social media elements, such as social networking features and user generated platforms directly into their commerce environments.
As a result of this, online retailers can create and own a unique social experience that would encompass the entire customer lifecycle. Customers can than enjoy a more integrated shopping experience and retailers will see an increase in unique visitors to their online store that are “predisposed” to their marketing messages. This will streamline marketing efforts and lead to increased profits and decreased costs.
Social media allows empowering customers by enabling them to establish user profiles that pull in data and relationships to online stores. At this point customers can interact and provide you (the online retailer) invaluable customer feedback, and bring in potential new customers.
By building and maintaining vibrant communities that address the passion of the retailer’s core audience, and then spreading that passion to the larger social web, retailers will attract loyal and engaged customers, and will achieve better business results.
Social media is absolutely crucial to an online retailer’s success today. Social media allows you to engage a customer, get new business, and most importantly elicit invaluable customer feedback that will turn into increased sales.
More privacy concerns as Facebook users can now “check-in”
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Social Commerce, Social Media, Social Networking on August 23rd, 2010
Facebook users can already poke, post, like and share. Now the social networking website has added another activity to its arsenal of social activities – users can now “check-in”.
With its Places feature, which it launched on Wednesday, users can broadcast their location to the web, track their friends’ movements and see who else has checked-in to a specific location.
Using Facebook’s website via smartphone, users can check-in to locations from offices to bars to parks. The optional service, available initially in the US, will also allow users to tag their friends in posts, flagging their whereabouts as well.
Places might eventually open new financial opportunities for Facebook through partnerships with retailers and restaurants, and location-specific advertising. But the launch will be scrutinised by privacy advocates concerned that the social networking company is increasingly reckless with user data.
“The prospect of it is pretty interesting from a marketer’s perspective, and pretty scary from a consumer’s perspective,” said Ken Johns, digital strategist at advertising agency Brunner.
Places is hardly a breakthrough. Start-ups, including Foursquare and Gowalla, have made location-based social services among the hottest categories of business development on the web this year.
Users, however, have not signed up to these services en masse, and they remain niche offerings, catering to a few million early adopters. With Places, a large chunk of web users will instantly have the opportunity to share their location online.
“This could be the tipping point for location-based services,” said Dave Marsey, senior vice-president of media at Digitas, the advertising agency. “The real question is what value the consumer is going to get from this.”
To reach that tipping point, Facebook will have to convince users to utilise the service. “They’re going to have to convince users this is something that they want to participate in,” said Josh Martin, analyst at Strategy Analytics. “They will need some kind of incentive programme for this to take hold.”
At launch, Facebook did not include any incentives to users. Places does not involve reward programmes with retailers, “mayorships” or “badges” – all common ways that location-based start-ups have attracted users. Instead, Facebook seems to be betting its users will find inherent social value in sharing their real-time location with one another.
That might be the case. However, Facebook will have to tread carefully as it rolls out Places. Adding delicate information such as a user’s location to the mix will add a new layer of complexity to the social network’s already dense privacy settings.
“There are definitely going to be privacy concerns,” said Mr Martin. “There [are] hundreds of millions of people that don’t want to share their location, whether it’s because of privacy concerns or because they are of a different generation and don’t care.”
Simon Davies of Privacy International, a campaign group, said that even sharing location data with approved friends created problems, as the site encourages people to create large networks. “Friends are friends on Facebook and that’s the problem,” he said. “I have 600 Facebook friends but there are only 10 people who I would want to know my comings and goings.”
Facebook has looked to head off the debate by stressing that Places was geared towards existing networks of friends. “Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world but about sharing your location with your friends,” said Michael Sharon, Facebook product manager.
“We have a comprehensive set of safeguards and controls to really let users control their privacy on Places,” said Mr Sharon. The product is launching with granular privacy controls similar to those Facebook launched earlier this year, and the default setting will share a user’s location only with their friends.
Marketers are salivating at the prospect of knowing the real-time location of even a fraction of Facebook’s 500m users.
“From a marketer’s perspective, the Holy Grail is to talk to people on an individual basis,” said Mr Johns. “This gives us another piece of information to connect with people in real time.”
Social Media..a recognised source now for news junkies!
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Social Media, Thoughts & Opinions on August 19th, 2010
According to a study conducted by United Kingdom based iCD Research, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are catching up to major news websites when it comes to which source users turn to for breaking news.
The picture is not at all bad for traditional newspapers, which are managing to stay afloat despite heavy declines in their standard circulations, but the research results do provide the latest illustration of how the worlds of new and old media continue to collide.
Social Network Use Shoots Up
Based on results from the 1,000-person survey, conducted exclusively in the United Kingdom, 50.4 percent of consumers still favor the BBC website as their primary breaking-news platform, but social media tops all other contenders, coming in at a strong second with 18.4 percent.
As more and more people log on to social networks (Facebook recently eclipsed 500 million users) for more and more time each day (jumping from roughly 3 to 5.5 hours a month during 2009, the Nielsen Co. reported earlier this year via Marketing Charts), it should not be surprising that their news-consumption habits should migrate to social media networks as well.
Dead-Tree Media Still Standing, But On Uneven Footing
The report dovetails with increasing fears over the fate of the traditional “dead-tree” publications. Newspaper circulation in the developed world dropped precipitously between 2007 and 2009 (by 30 percent in the U.S. and 25 percent in the U.K., respectively, according to one estimate). News websites have been seen as the next logical means for those outlets to hang onto readers, and this year started out better than any in a long time for newspapers in that sense, with properties attracting record traffic to their websites in the first quarter of the year.
Of course, social media continues to change the game: In the iCD study, not a single British newspaper website topped the social media category, with the pay-walled Times of London website receiving a paltry 5.4 percent in support.
The Great Tumblr Rush
Interestingly, while many traditional media organizations are attempting to use Facebook and Twitter to redirect traffic to their main sites (with less-than-stellar results, at best), there is one, lesser-known, less-trafficked social media platform that has lately become something of a magnet for news websites, despite its novelty and unfamiliarity: Tumblr — the weird microblog platform that fills a niche somewhere between Facebook and Twitter and eschews the now-standard comment threads in favor of a “reblog” option.
Traditional media heavy hitters such as The New York Times and The Atlantic are reportedly having “a field day” on Tumblr. But the definition of a “field day” in this case may be a bit overstated. So far, many of the websites have simply staked out domains on the service (ironically, the financially strapped Newsweek was one of the first, and so far few, to actually carve out a decent Tumblr-exclusive content presence), so it remains to be seen just how they will employ it and how effective it will be at drawing readers to their main websites.
Tablet Gamble
Add to that today’s revelation that News Corp. publisher Rupert Murdoch will launch an all-digital U.S. “national newspaper” specifically formatted for mobile and tablet devices such as the iPad, and what you have is … well, an unprecedented new/old-media collision, in which a sustainable 21st century business model remains as elusive as ever.
Of course, there are diehard holdouts to all of this newfangled social-media mumbo-jumbo. Among the respondents to the British study, 276 indicated that they straight up “do not get their news from the Internet.” Maybe they are waiting for someone to get it right?
The future of f-commerce being played out..
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Online Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Media on August 17th, 2010
So P&G are developing quite a taste for f-commerce – selling on Facebook. In the UK, with their Amazon-powered Facebook store for the makeup of makeup artists brand Max Factor, and in the US, now a Facebook Campaign Store to support and capitalize (literally) on their heavily promoted and much talked about Old Spice Man campaign.
From the Facebook storefront, Old Spice aficionados – yes they now exist – can buy branded merchandise from the Super-Bowl-to-Real-Time-Social-Media ‘Old Spice Man’ campaign featuring shirtless baritone and ex-NFL player Isaiah Mustafa, replete with washboard ads and comedic timing.
As with the UK store, P&G has outsourced all the heavy lifting with the Old Spice Man Campaign Store – the Facebook store is simply a storefront linking through to an external e-store managed by a e-commerce partner in Massachusetts that looks after fulfillment and customer service.
So one of our predictions we make when speaking about the future of social commerce is no longer a prediction – the emergence of Facebook campaign stores to support and monetize marketing campaigns – pop-up f-stores – engage with the promotion; buy the merchandise. The P&G Campaign store is elementary, and no doubt could be improved, but all the elements are there. And it’s there. Welcome to the world of Facebook Campaign Stores.
Why do we think pop-up (temporary) Facebook Campaign Stores are the future of f-commerce? They’re quick, cheap and easy to set up, they help monetize campaigns, and ultimately, because they may help solve the century-plus old problem encapsulated in the famous quote of disputed origin) origin “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
Whilst much advertising, including the digital variety, is and should be focused on building lifetime customer value (AKA ‘Brand building) rather than producing sales bumps, any integrated campaign that creates a digital trace between advertising and buyer behavior can only be a good thing.
So if you manage a brand, why not take a leaf from the book of the biggest advertisers in the world, and throw up a Facebook store for your next campaign? And if you are an agency, why not consider teaming up with the burgeoning number of f-commerce solution providers out there and start proposing campaigns with real ROI?
Social media is there for you to build your online reputation!
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions on August 16th, 2010
Most large companies have already realised this and make use of Facebook, MySpace, etc. to reinforce their online presence, but a shocking number of PR specialists and business owners are still not using social media to their full advantage.
For every person that “adds” your company, in whatever social website environment, you know that all their friends will see that they have expressed an interest – great news for your online reputation. Some will be curious and check your business out for themselves, and this is the key to social media; if you can get one person’s attention, you can get the attention of their friends without trying.
The first thing to tackle, obviously, is finding people who are likely to take an interest in your company from a social media angle. This might be quite easy if you are a small business – since you probably already have a large number of Facebook friends (or similar) that might be happy to register their interest in your company’s profile page. If this doesn’t sound like it will work for you, why not offer your existing customers an incentive for following your business online? Maybe a link to a printable voucher every week.
Once you have a following, it is only a matter of interacting with them and producing content that will either get them talking or get them interested in what your business has to offer. If you have the sort of business that relies on repeat custom, then you are in the ideal position to offer special deals to your social media followers. If not, simply send individualised messages to your followers until they are willingly interacting with the discussions on your business’s main page – and if you don’t know what to talk about, you can always hire a writer to take care of your online reputation!
Interacting with people is what reputation management is all about at its most essential level. Your online reputation will hinge upon your ability to stay in touch with at least a small sample of your market and keep abreast of what they want. Using Facebook, or Bebo, or any other website to create a small following is a fantastic way of keeping a sample of people on hand to give you feedback about your business. The most important thing of all though, is that once you have gotten involved in social media your reputation (whether good or bad) will become wider.
We can help you build and then manage your online reputation. Simply get in touch, and let us see how we can work together.
Starbucks…on top of their social media game
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Social Commerce, Social Media, Social Networking on August 10th, 2010
You’ve got to hand it to Starbucks, they’re the world’s most liked brand, in Facebook-world that is.
After pioneering social commerce-powered loyalty programmes on Facebook, using Foursquare to offer discounts for mayoral checkins, learning from Dell to create a customer-powered idea blog, and running promoted tweet campaigns on Twitter, Starbucks have now hooked up with the social commerce leader in private sales, Gilt.com in the US to offer their loyalty card holders early access to their new limited-edition luxury San Cristóbal ‘Special Reserve’ Starbucks coffee from the Gálapagos islands.
It works like this – if you’re one of the 1m+ Starbucks loyalty card members (MyStarbucksRewards), you’ll have received a special email invitation offering VIP early access to a private sale of the new, yet-to-be-launched ultra-premium San Cristóbal coffee on Gilt, a day before Gilt members get access, and weeks before anyone else. And you get to exercise your bragging rights with the ubiquitous Facebook like button on Gilt.
What we like, or rather love , about Starbucks’ latest social commerce initiative is it builds the brand, reinforcing the brand’s ability to discover and source some of the world’s exotic, rare and exquisite coffees and bring both the flavors and the experience to life for customers – especially it’s best customers.
It’s also smart social commerce in that that doesn’t erode margins – offering early access rather than price discounts to brand fans and followers. Furthermore, the initiative is designed to boost loyalty, rather than effect a short-term promotional sale bump – and in true Flip-the-Funnel fashion – is likely to stimulate advocacy whilst building customer lifetime value.
Additionally, it’s a very efficient social commerce initiative, leveraging an existing social commerce platform – the member-get-member powered Gilt.com – rather than seeking to build it’s own. And by choosing a social commerce platform designed for luxury brands – the luxury credentials of San Cristóbal are reinforced. We don’t know much this cost Starbucks – but given that loyalty card members have to join Gilt to access the VIP event, it’s quite possible it cost the brand nothing at all.
And finally, it’s a very successful social commerce initiative – Gilt sold out of San Cristóbal coffee before most Gilt customers could get access to the Private Sale; Starbucks loyalty customers snapped everything up.
We think this is a smart approach to doing smart social commerce – and one other brands, particularly upscale or luxury brands would do well to consider – and possibly emulate. How could you launch a product linking Facebook with a Private-Sales platform?
Making the social media opportunities work for you
Posted by Paul McSweeney in E Mail Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions on August 9th, 2010
One of your main online marketing strategies should be through Social Media outlets.
Why?
Because it’s 2010 and that’s just how it’s done. When using Social Media sites your main focus should be on sending direct targeted traffic to your site, building an arsenal of quality back links, generating online exposure by strengthening your websites online presence, attracting potential clients/users, shining a light on whatever it is you’re providing and building trust.
The four main pillars of social media that you should focus on are:
- Blogs
- Social Networking Sites
- Social Bookmarking Sites
- Forums
Social Media: Blogs
First if you don’t already have one, you’ll need to set up your websites blog that you will also need to optimize for the search engines: You’ll need it to connect to an array of services that will help get the word out about new content on the blog and site via the blogs RSS feed. You can then submit the RSS feed to a number of popular RSS aggregators that relay snippets of recent blog posts made and a link.
You’ll also use the site’s blog to generate exposure for the website through social media news sites such as Technorati and others like it. With a blog, people are more likely to link back to articles posted which in turn would help the site’s overall authority in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and Page Rank.
Social Network Sites
Networking is the key to any online marketing strategy, as it brings us that much closer to our targeted audience, and one-to-one with potential clients. Through Social Networking sites you should generate a following, a reader base, and interact with them in a way that will help shine the spot light on the company or product/service you’re offering.
A few of these sites include:
- Tumblr
- Myspace
- PartnerUp
- Qapacity
- Ryze
- Talkbiznow
Search engine spiders troll these sites looking for links to something new and relevant so you should always utilize all the profile pages on these sites. You can easily do this by placing you site’s link and a bio where appropriate. Remember, keep your bios keyword rich and targeted but not spammy, that’s the key. With twitter for example, the Bio in your profile ends up being your profile pages description so keep things like that in mind.
Social Bookmarking Sites
These are an entirely different breed of social media sites and often confused with social networks. With social bookmarking sites, you end up generating exposure for the individual blog posts and articles. This is done by creating accounts on the top social bookmarking sites and submitting your article links as interesting to read content and spreading the word that way. Among those sites are a few popular bookmark giants such as:
- Delicious
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
Remember, the key to making any Social Media campaign work is interaction and one-on-one marketing rather than mass marketing and spamming people.
Forums
Further exposure can be achieved by registering on some of the web’s most popular forums, posting a few relevant threads, posts and general topics then adding links to your site/blog in both the forum signature and profile. DON’T join a community to spam them or talk incessantly about your website or business because like any community, listening, commenting, and making a genuine contribution here and there would yield better results and land you more potential clients, especially when people search for your business and find knowledgeable individuals representing your company helping others in the same industry online. It’s all about becoming an industry professional online!
In addition to forum marketing, you can also tap into e-mail based discussion lists and groups.
If you need any advice on how to maximise these different options for the benefit of your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01694 724 899.
Social media at work…yes or no?
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Social Media, Thoughts & Opinions on August 7th, 2010
According to the Washington Post newspaper, employees who fritter time away on Facebook, Twitter and other social media Web sites are costing British businesses billions, new research suggests.
British employment website MyJobGroup.co.uk said it polled 1,000 British workers and found that nearly six percent, or 2 million, of the UK’s 34 million-strong workforce spent over an hour per day on social media while at work, amounting to more than one eighth of their entire working day.
“Our results clearly show that UK workers are spending increased time whilst at work on social media networks, which, left unchecked, could have negative repercussions on the productivity of many companies across the country,”
MyJobGroup.co.uk said that work time lost on Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks could potentially be costing Britain up to 14 billion pounds ($22.16 billion).
The research showed more than half of British workers (55 percent) confessed to accessing social media profiles at work, with many spending so much time friending, tweeting, adding photos and video, as well as updating their profiles, that companies’ productivity was suffering as a result.
Despite the negative effects on the economy in the midst of a fragile recovery, many workers polled were in denial about the ill-effects of social media on their efficiency. Only 14 percent of respondents admitted to being less productive as a result of social media and 10 percent even claimed social media had made them more productive.
What’s more, there was still widespread resistance to banning access to social networks at work, with over two thirds (68 percent) advocating some form of access during working hours. Only one third wanted sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube barred during work time, demonstrating the growing importance of social media to the daily routine and the widespread resistance to its access being limited.
“Whilst we’re certainly not kill-joys, people spending over an hour per day in work time on the likes of Facebook and Twitter are seriously hampering companies’ efforts to boost productivity, which is more important than ever given the fragile state of our economy,” a spokesman for MyJobGroup said.
Companies would do well to monitor use of social networking sites during work hours and ensure that their employees are not abusing their freedom of access to these sites.
What is your take on this? Are we taking our jobs for granted by accessing social media profiles at work? Please let us know with your comments.
5 of the biggest online reputation management mistakes
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Social Media, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions on August 5th, 2010
Not Listening: The biggest mistake that companies make is either to not listen to customers at all or monitor very few social media channels.
- Not Listening to Customers: Customers can be a source of ideas, feedback, complaints and insights. Listening to customers has numerous advantages, most important of which being that it helps to better understand consumer demand, their likes and dislikes and it also helps in discovering new trends in your industry.
- Monitoring very few social media channels can be a problem as well. Facebook & Twitter is not the end of the web, there are numerous other channels that may be equally if not more important from your perspective/ for your business. Ideally you should use a free tool that will help you monitor most important social media channels like blogs, image and video sharing sites, wikis, micro blogging sites, customer forums, consumer complaint sites etc.
Responding to everything: Most companies work with limited resources, so its advisable that you prioritize what you monitor and prioritize the conversations that you want to be a part of.
This is what we advise:
- If it’s a complaint – definitely acknowledge it. Don’t ignore it just because someone does not like your product or services. Ideally put out a solution through the same medium at the earliest. Don’t forget, the solution is not only for the user who has posted the complaint but for the thousands of other users who will stumble upon the page in the future. At the same time include the steps you are taking to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
- If the complaint is false – make sure you correct the facts in public.
- If it’s a general conversation – gauge who has started the conversation, where the conversation is hosted and how well you can contribute to it. For example, give Yahoo answers preference, because its well visited, and visible on search engines.
Not planning for the future: Online Reputation Management is not only about reacting to an online attack/bad review/negative comment but its also being proactive. It’s about building reputation. An important strategy we use to be proactive with online reputation Management is to work towards disincentivizing users from sharing on public forums. Don’t cheat the consumer but create value for users to come to you first and then reward them through a faster and better service.
Being dishonest: This is something we see each day. Companies using fake identities to post positive reviews about themselves, their products and services on social media sites. In this social media age where everything is so transparent do you really think you can fool someone? More often than not these fake reviews and fake identities will come back to haunt you so be very careful. If you do want to engage in a conversation use your genuine identity.
Being Disrespectful: Some companies do not take negative feedback very well. You should get used to this and not threaten to take legal action every time someone speaks ill of you. Firstly taking legal action costs a lot of precious money, which can be used for other more useful purposes. Secondly, threatening users on the web will get the attention of bloggers and in this social media age you don’t want to be on their bad books.
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