Social media's future looks bright, apply sunscreen | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
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"It's really an evolution of media from a one-way direction to a highly interactive model, where people are developing relationships around content. That drives engagement...and creates a whole new opportunity for business," Mike Jensen, director of technology group at Credit Suisse,
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One opportunity for new business is in e-commerce.
Dave McClure, an angel investor at 500 Hats, believes the future of the business will be in so-called social commerce, or the intersection between online shopping and socializing. Netflix might be an example of early social commerce because it encourages members to recommend movies to friends. But he envisions social commerce going much further.
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"Social commerce is where (the business is) headed. Companies that have mined enough social graph data and can combine shopping to it--whoever figures that out, they will be set," McClure said during a panel.
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more developers should be working on applications that provide utility to people, rather than just entertainment. For example, spin-offs of Twitter for health care or emergency workers could hold promise
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Thanks to social networks like MySpace and Facebook, companies are armed with much more data on people's habits, preferences, and social behavior. Executives believe that data, if used right, can build the next advertising giant.
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Still, social networks have long been challenged to sell their inventory to mainstream advertisers for several reasons. For one, advertisers are squeamish about putting their brands next to a user-generated video of high-school band practice, for example. Another reason is that salespeople from social networks don't speak the same language of metrics that traditional advertisers and agencies speak.
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"The promise for this space is that you've got this engaged audience--people spending 20 to 40 minutes talking to each other in a way they haven't before--and if you put these ads in front of them, what do you call it and how do you sell it to agencies?"
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MySpace is seeing early success for its advertising service called hypertargeting, which lets advertisers reach customers by their behavior on the social network. Oberfest said people are responding more positively to those ads.
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Seth Goldstein, founder of SocialMedia Networks, an advertising platform for social networks, said that he envisions an open system from Facebook or MySpace that would allow companies to look at a person's social graph, or collection of their friends. Then the company could extract who is most influential to that individual in areas like travel or movie recommendations.
"If I can select the right person to have influence over you, I can choose that person to send you a message," he said.
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Nicolas Kardas, senior product manager at Microsoft's Windows Live Platform group, said despite the forward twist on social media, the business models aren't that different than those of years past. It's just that with social networks, companies know much more about the consumer, and that information delivers the option of a much bigger premium for advertising.
The Next Big Thing: Twitter and Microblogging - Business benefits to Twitter
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Business are also using Twitter for direct outreach to customers: Dell offers discounts on Twitter, and @Freshbooks is an example of a great small business using Twitter to connect directly with customers and prospects.
Marketbright Uses Social Media in New Offering to Enhance Customer Experience
Marketbright, the only on-demand emarketing solution with an integrated web content management platform, today launched Brightsite, a new product that uses aspects of social networking to create a stronger bond between sales, marketing and the customer. Brightsite effectively creates the equivalent of a B2B shopping cart for enterprise web sites.
Tags: social media, emarketing, marketing, advertising, b2b on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
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16 Great Ways To Approach Social Media Marketing - A Beginner’s Guide
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Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:
- Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
- Conversion and sales tracking
- Page views, ad exposure
- Growing brand awareness (a softer value, takes longer to build)
- Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there (see also reputation management)
- Business development and a broader customer reach
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Social media expansion is important because this provides foundations for broader / faster mindshare, along with supporting your search engine marketing objectives. You *can* convert traffic if you target appropriately (research needed), and do not spam.
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Tip #1 - Assistance:
Limit talking about yourself, at least initially - provide ways to help others instead. This is probably the most important tip in the social media workplace. Say you are building your new del.icio.us profile, make sure to bookmark other useful resources and sprinkle yourself lightly. It’s about “them”, not “you”. Don’t forget this important rule! -
Tip #4 - Connect:
Reach out to the influencers in your niche, be polite, honest, sincere, and you’d be amazed what brand advocates can do for you. -
Tip #5 - Position:
Position yourself in front of consumers’ passions. It can and will create a powerful outcome for your brand. -
Tip #3 - Contribute:
Be the one to create (quality) content. While community is Queen in Social Media, quality content is still King, and always will be. Studies show that people are reading much online, but a much smaller group is contributing content. This can mean good opportunities for you. -
Tip #7 - Links:
Don’t be afraid to link out to other blogs and websites in general. Links are what search engines and users make good use of - and search engines would not survive without them. Give others the love too. -
Tip #6 - Blog:
Make sure you have setup a blog. These numbers are not to be overlooked. I think Technorati is tracking over 110 million blogs now, and growing at a furious pace, even excluding splogs (spam blogs). -
Tip #8 - Videos:
Video consumption is growing fast. Create a “how to…” or “top tips…” videos and submit to YouTube. It has wide reach, and you could have millions of people see it. For even wider distribution, you should try tubemogul.com or vidmetrix.com, tools to help automate. In generating all content, make sure to keep #1 rule in check. It’s fine to brand with a URL at the end of the video, but no direct selling. Humor, controversy and weird stuff works very well, keep that in mind - don’t be afraid to test. -
Tip #9 - Technorati:
You said you have a blog, right? Claim your blog at Technorati. -
be the first to comment and engage in your topic. First commenters often get more visibility and traction.
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Tip #12 - MicroCommunities:
Locate and join microcommunities - they are social communities that are relevant to your business. Some examples are education.com, nowpublic.com, travbuddy.com, gardenweb.com, shoetube.com, yelp.com and care2.com (non profits). It is much easier to have your voice heard in these and similar markets, than trying a post to Digg that may go nowhere. Those are the perfect places for the “big fish in a small pond” rule. Create highly relevant and linkworthy content, research what others are writing about, and connect with the top players and influencers. -
Your Top Social Media Starter Resources (not necessarily in order of importance):
Blogger: PR 2.0 - Post a Comment
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IMG: How people approach social technologies
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Drew McLellan - The Marketing Minute: What social media tools are a must for business?
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Specialised forums - our 'forte' are the DIY forums where we give out free advice, using our business name as nickname - again a great webtool. Investment is more in time than money but works a treat for us.
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A blog - it's becoming essential.
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LinkedIn - builds online credibility & good opps with Q&A
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Measurement tool - I just started researching social media monitoring tools and I'm convinced to really demonstrate ROI and worth, you need a specialized tool. I just reviewed Social Radar on my blog & there's many others popping up everywhere.
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I think internal tools are going to be a huge necessity in the coming years - wikis, CMS, internal blogs, IM etc, etc. In fact, I would go so far to say that internal tools for employee collaboration will be the leading edge of the social media wave for businesses. The generation of workers coming through the ranks now are going to be able to wield these with incredible effectiveness. I see it happening in a lot of businesses I deal with.
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flickr
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Find your key audiences on technorati, build multiple blogs to focus and talk to each audience, post good copy and throwin a few flickr images and youtube video's.
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The reality is...today's 20-something is entering the work place already using this stuff. Employers are wise to tap that natural gift.
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the companies that can harness the collaborative power of some of the social media tools are going to have a huge advantage.
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We've become regulars at two very different DIY-forums (found them when I did research for my own website - they were already well established forums - means high ranking incoming links when I manage to add a link in our reply - only when it's appropriate otherwise it might be considered advertising).
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In the last two years we gained 6 -7 clients (for large floors) directly or indirectly from these forums - and it only costs us a bit of time to respond to the questions there - 'easy money' ;-)
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I think it is best to focus on just one good, strong blog. There are hundreds of different ways of promoting that blog through a mixture of SEO, traditional marketing, PR, much smaller blogs, social networking, and more.
Social networking to promote your business but, also, you main blog. Your blog is like the heavy cavalry and your social networking tools: like the scouts or the light infantry. -
But your example is perfect one. I think the trick is think different. See what the others in your industry don't see.
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The utilities category is a great one. Don't talk to me about utilities...talk to me being green or keeping my family safe at home. One of the things I believe most businesses miss when it comes to social media is that it's not really about them or what they want to talk about.
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Depends on the relationships you're trying to build -- where are they hanging? What tools are they using? Who will be the face of your business?
It's not about the tools, but it IS about the talk. That said,
For listening (which always comes first), FriendFeed. For quick chat, Twitter. And of course....a blog site.
Social Radar - The Social Media Moniting Solution
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The Social Customer Manifesto: Reaching Out: Four Retail Companies That Are Reaching Out with Blogs and Social Media
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The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway. If this site didn't exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog. With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.
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The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: "McDonald's owns any comments or other content that you post on this
site. That means that McDonald's has the right to make, have made,
offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit,
display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout
the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without
compensation to you. McDonald's also has the right to use your name in
connection with any use of your submissions." This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer. -
A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.
Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile
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Branding, the Most Important Factor of | Jacob Morgan's Marketing Ideas and Rants
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So what’s the difference between branding fifty years ago and today? What’s the most important factor for successful brand building? One word, relationships. That’s right, relationships. It’s not about how many people you reach, how many impressions you get, or how many times your commercial plays on the television. It’s about the conversations you are having with people, it’s about the relationships you are building. Your customers are your friends, treat them as such. Your brand should be a massive relationship builder. Branding is becoming less and less about sitting behind your computer and writing press releases. Branding is becoming more about in person interaction, about face to face contact, and about one-to-one marketing.
Web 2.0 Expo Reveals: Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies - Wolfe's Den Blog - InformationWeek
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Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook andMySpacepresage the media company of the future.
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No one, and I can't stress this enough, gives a shit about your brand. They care about what user experience you deliver to them. This obtains whether you're in the physical world selling a product, or online serving up content.
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The new go-to destination of users won't be home pages but instead will be Web apps. That is, users will access content -- news, blogs, video -- and interact with your (their) communities via apps, hopefully apps that you develop and sell ads around.
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One pundit at Web 2.0, Brian Fling, put it more succinctly. He sees the iPhone as a new medium in and of itself, as significant as radio, television, and the Internet itself have been.
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When you think about it, the Smartphone is the first device that fulfills McLuhan's prediction that electronics will become an extension of the human nervous system.
Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Viral marketing, activation, and retention metrics - commentary on Dave McClure's Web 2.0 presentation
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Businesses told to exploit social media
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"The move toward social media is as big a change as Gutenberg and the printing press," said Karl Long, a product manager at Nokia. "Social media is the ability for anyone to publish anything without any cost."
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Panelists said the social media sites are changing communications.
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The panelists said businesses are beginning to recognize the benefits of having conversations with consumers.
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businesses can learn from young people who create their own sites.
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Social media can be used to create word-of-mouth advocacy for products or services,
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real estate agents, for instance, are using Web sites that include reviews from clients after their homes have been sold.
Tweeting for Companies 101 | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon
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Spreading as many internet memes as possible is good.
Social Media still on rise: Comparative global study
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sian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
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Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
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57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos
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23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates
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Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog
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Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs
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Interestingly, comments on news websites show almost no increase
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Estimated 272m users world-wide.
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Users are posting variety of content – 55% uploaded photos – 21% installed applications – 23% uploaded video • Social Networks becoming social utilities for managing peer to peer relationships: 74% use them to message friends
IndustryWeek : Four Steps to Understanding the Blogosphere
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the goal is to establish long-term relationships with your customers -- and that's what bloggers are: your customers.
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It's about the relationship over time, not overnight. Do you want a one-night stand, or a commitment? If you want a commitment, take the time to get to know them.
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Do Your Homework. Since bloggers are your customers, you should have a pretty good idea of what matters to them, but don't simply rely on the mass media approaches you may have used in advertising and direct marketing -- demographic analysis, segmentation, "targeting," models of consumer behavior and so on. These tools aren't sufficient to build a relationship. Building a relationship with a blogger is much like making a friend. You don't make your friends based on their demographic profile; you make friends by getting to know them.
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Your products only matter in as much as they connect with your customers' passions.
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Be Transparent. When you reach out to a blogger, he or she is also part of a social network, of which the blog is one piece. Everybody e-mails everyone else. They are also on microblogging platforms like Twitter and social nets like Facebook. Nothing snowballs faster than bad news. If something does go wrong, whether it is with a product or a program, get out in front of it fast. Don't wait for other people to tell your story. Tell it yourself.
IndustryWeek : The 'No Excuses' Plan for Online Marketing
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According to analyst firm IDC, the online advertising segment grew 27% in 2007, and yet when considering if and when to invest in online marketing efforts, many manufacturers go through a litany of excuses.
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"If your company doesn't have an online presence that can easily be found in search engines, product review sites, industry Web sites and user forums, you can be assured that these searchers will find one of your competitors," warns Komack. "Even if you're already well entrenched with a customer, your lack of online presence has just given a competitor a window of opportunity to establish a dialogue that may eventually lead to a shift by your customer to that other vendor."
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If your Web site doesn't serve at least two primary purposes -- acting as a lead generation vehicle and providing technical resources for users -- you're losing half the battle, observes Komack. "Even if your primary sales channel is a dealer network, your Web site should serve as a means of generating leads to pass on to your dealer network."
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Not only should your Web site serve as a means of capturing leads (which also can build a nice in-house mailing list), a manufacturing Web site should also provide excellent, up-to-date content about technical specifications and, ideally, provide content that will help end users utilize your equipment more efficiently (this goes for finished products as well as OEM products, says Komack). "This additional content will help build loyalty to your brand and will drive search engine traffic in a variety of ways."
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"online marketing allows for a high level of tracking capabilities, so you can associate spending choices online with leads generated and sales that come later in the sales cycle."
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Another payoff comes in the form of gathering marketing intelligence about your industry, assures Komack. "You can gather valuable information about how people search for your products, such as keywords used in search engines, and leverage that information to other marketing efforts such as creating marketing collateral and identifying customer needs that you may not have been aware of in the past."
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Komack tells his manufacturing clients to consider that "every time a prospect finds you online, that is one more opportunity to keep that potential customer from your competitors."
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Manufacturers that do not use their Web sites effectively and do not build an online presence, Komack concludes, are missing significant opportunities for generating leads, building customer loyalty, gathering marketing intelligence, and keeping prospects from competitors.
IndustryWeek : Four Tips for Social Media Marketing
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Numerous studies have shown that peer recommendation of the type embodied in many blogs consistently receive much higher credibility ratings when compared to normal advertising channels.
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the company has created a branded widget that soon-to-be mothers can use to count down due dates, and that can be easily embedded on a local desktop or on the Web in the Facebook or MySpace pages of its consumers.
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Additionally, it is utilizing online tools like Meetup.com to facilitate face-to-face contact between loyal consumers.
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"While the brands themselves in a way are marketing to the Meetup organizers, they're hoping to connect through them to the members and -- the big win -- through the members to their friends outside the Meetup sphere."
Study: Majority Use Social Media to 'Vent' About Customer Care - ClickZ
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the online study found that 72 percent of respondents used social media to research a company's reputation for customer care before making a purchase, and 74 percent choose to do business with companies based on the customer care experiences shared by others online.
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59 percent said they regularly use social media to "vent" about their customer care frustrations, suggesting that consumers looking to make a purchase decision first wade through a mass of negative commentary.
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Savvy consumers "will not support companies with poor customer care reputations, and they will talk about all of this openly with others via multiple online vehicles,"
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Only 33 percent of respondents said they believe companies take such online complaints seriously.
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As for which industries made best use of social media, technology and retail ranked highest, while insurance, utilities and healthcare ranked lowest.
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"Search allows consumers to find their information without being tied to the company, and now we have social media, where the customers voice is not only heard, it's louder. A customer's voice can now be global," she said. "If companies provide that care it can impact the reputation of the company itself."