Archive for category Social Networking
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.
Foursquare founder slates Facebook Places
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Client News, Facebook, Social Networking on August 24th, 2010
Talking to The Telegraph, Dennis Crowley, said he had now had time to play around with Facebook’s new location tool, which directly rivals his own product by allowing people to share their location with their network, through checking into bars, clubs and restaurants on their mobile phone.
He said: “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and to tell their friends where they are.
“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”
Facebook declined to comment.
At the end of last week Facebook launched Places in the US.The new tool lets users share their location in a very similar fashion to popular location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla. People’s friends on the site can see if their friends are near them at any time, if they have chosen to check-into their current location.
US Facebook users need to update their iPhone Facebook app, or visit touch.facebook.com, to get access to the tool. A user then needs to select ‘Places’, tap the ‘Check-In’ button, and then a list of nearby places will come up on the screen. Facebook members then can choose the place which matches their location, and if its not on the list, they can search for it or add it.
Once ‘checked in’, the activity will be posted in a user’s news feed and come up in the ‘Recent Activity’ section on the specific location’s page.
Crowley believes that Foursqaure’s gaming mechanics, such as the prospect of a user becoming the ‘mayor’ of a location they have visited the most frequently, will keep people far more enticed into using his service over the likes of Places. He has also firmly rebuffed the notion that Facebook’s new tool will blow Foursquare out of the water.
“I always knew Facebook would launch a check-in tool. I knew that on the day we started creating Foursquare. But I also knew that people needed incentives to keep checking-in and sharing their location. Facebook could copy our games ideas, but we are working on a raft of new mechanics which we hope will keep Foursquare fresh and ‘check-in fatigue’ away.” He declined to divulge any details of new features in the pipeline out of fear of rivals copying the plans afoot.
Crowley also offered a glimpse of his vision of Foursquare’s long-term future. “In the future, I want Foursquare to be able to tell people where to go wherever they are in the world, based on their previous visiting habits, likes and dislikes and the time of day…We want to be able to push venue suggestions to you. That’s what I am pushing towards as we develop Foursquare’s tools and how we use our data,” he explained.
Facebook has said it is working with the likes Foursquare and Yelp, to develop Places. Crowley said that Places’s open API means that people checking in on Foursquare will be able to push this information through to the Places feed and vice versa. However, Foursquare have yet to turn this capability on – but will do within “the next two weeks”. And Crowley confirmed this would not be a commercial arrangement.
Crowley said he had no regrets about not being acquired by Facebook, having “had conversations” about it in the past, as he was not ready to let go of the business.
He did admit though that Facebook’s head start with more than 500 million members, versus Foursquare’s near three million registered users, was a “little scary”.
The location-based social network signed up it two millionth member in July, three months after acquiring its first million users.
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.”
Its sensible to embrace Online reputation management
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Facebook, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions, Twitter on August 18th, 2010
If you are the owner of a business you may already be aware of how your potential customers are using the internet as a way to help them make decisions on which product and brand to purchase. Whether you own the business or if it is part of your job title, you must remain aware of what your current and potential customers are saying, who they are saying it to, and where.
You need to either be trained in this ability yourself or at least be aware of the tools you can use to help manage the reputation of your business. Online reputation management is a key aspect of running a business in today’s environment and it will probably become more and more important as more people use the internet to help them decide on products and services.
Of course it could be that your business or organization currently has an excellent reputation. Perhaps your support team, your sales group, and other customer-facing pieces of your business do a wonderful job and their efforts are reflected as such on the internet. While this may be true, you have to know for certain this is the case. Guessing is not wise.
If, on the other hand, you have a bad online reputation, deserved or not, you need to know. Perhaps there was an incident that caused a pain for one of your customers, or maybe your competition is being malicious. Either way you must be up to speed on what is being said, where they are saying it, and what your options might be.
If you are going to run a successful business in today’s internet environment you will need to be aware of both the good and the bad things that people are saying about your products and services. You will need to recognize the way these comments can help to determine your company’s bottom line at the end of every month.
With the popularity of the internet all it takes is one bad apple, so to speak, perhaps even something typed as a joke on a social networking site, to bring your reputation down considerably. News travels fast on the internet, and bad news travels even faster, and consumers will stick together if they believe a company has taken advantage of a customer.
Managing your reputation online is not a single action but rather a process. This includes maintaining high visibility, positive publicity, and the right kind of marketing. They move beyond the negative you need to do everything within your power to gain high web site rankings from search engines. This can help to keep the negative comments off the first page of search results.
You will find it necessary to keep a close eye on the opinion of the public. Watching social networks and blogs are essential. You will have to take a long look at the comments being made and you must make every effort to protect and defend your company’s trademark and logo.
As you research online reputation management you will find there are a number of companies available to help you keep your reputation clean or help you cleanse one that has been tarnished. Find out what each company offers and consider using one to help you manage your business image and reputation. Remember that information on the web travels fast and you need to be one step ahead of those who might seek to affect your bottom line in a negative way.
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.
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.
Social Networks and Gaming on the increase
Posted by Paul McSweeney in Social Media, Social Networking, Thoughts & Opinions on August 4th, 2010
Chances are, you’re here by way of a status update on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter or some other method of sharing on a social network. A study released today by Nielsen – says that people now spend a quarter of all time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from just under 16% a year ago.
The study gives a breakdown of the top 10 online sectors according to how much time people spend using them, with social media and gaming leading the pack.
Among the top 10 sectors, only four have increased over the past year, with five losing ground and one remaining the same. The study shows that both social media and gaming have had the greatest increases over the past year, likely leading to drops in other areas, such as email and instant messaging, although communicating and networking still account for a little more than a third of people’s time online.
When it comes to mobile, the picture changes drastically, with email becoming the dominant sector, followed by portals and then social networking and blogs. The report doesn’t offer much detail in what it means by “mobile”, so we’re left wondering what types of mobile devices respondents are using and what this might mean for the time they spend. Nonetheless, email’s dominance in mobile would seem to indicate that, despite how much we message each other on Facebook, email still has a strong presence. Although email has seen a decline on the desktop, it is still the third heaviest activity online.
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