Social Media is Commitment, Not A Campaign

Posted on March 29, 2012 by roexcalv

Crafting a Social Media strategy is all about the right mindset. You can’t get expect to hack it with a four week blitz. You’re in it for the long haul, which also means you can’t expect to see an results in the first week.

Social Media’s all about creating an experience around your brand, and creating a two way flow of conversation (relationship marketing) that allows you to interact and learn from your consumer. Below’s some tips from DreamGrow on crafting a Social Media Strategy:

1. What Do You Do?

Describe what your company does in a single sentence. Make it Understandable to a 5 year old.

2. Listen to the Conversations

Now that you know what you are doing find out who’s talking about it. Find all the conversations that mention your brand directly or related to you in general.

3. Set a Goal

Why are you doing it? In the end you have to produce results and this is where you should write it down. In the beginning select just one and build your strategy to achieve that.

What gets measured gets done! Put a number on your goal.

4. Find Influencers and Communities

Go over the results you got from listening to the conversations and find who are talking about your brand. Who are having a following that might include you clients or prospects. Are there advocates who are really into your brand? Select the ones that you feel are the best match for your business and start monitoring them.

5. Who is Your Audience?

Select the target group that is most likely to be persuaded by your message. Who are the people who have most to gain by what do you do (step 1). Don’t try to please everyone at the same time with the same message.

One important thing to remember is the 1-9-90 rule. Only about 1 percent of people participate actively, 9 percent comment and interact occasionally and 90% are lurkers who do not contribute anything to the conversations.

The Age of Privacy is Over

Posted on March 21, 2012 by roexcalv

This topic repeatedly finds its way to the top of any conversion when it comes to talking social media and online marketing. People are being tracked every time they’re online and, anything they decide to post on Facebook is sold to marketers for research and consumer behaviour purposes. And then the complaints begin.

“I don’t want Facebook selling my info, or where I’ve been on the web, or where I’m checking into” and personal pet peeve “I hate the New Facebook”. You only hate the new Facebook cause you hate learning a new system, but once you understand why its infinitely better, you’re perfectly cool with it. We’re hypocritical in that sense. We want companies to continually innovate, provide us with the most amazing tools to stay connected, and a user interface thats intuitive and easy to understand. Yet when change comes our way, via a simple new design, we throw our hands up in the air in outrage.

But maybe that’s straying away from the issue of privacy. So here’s my take on it. Yes privacy is undoubtedly an important issue to keep in mind, but its soon going to be over. I think in the following generation, we’ll no longer hear complaints about where I’m checking into or what websites I’ve been on…because I think outside of jumping on the privacy bandwagon for the sake of it, we all want customization. And we can’t expect customization unless some of our data is shared.

Here’s my question, that no ones really be able to give me a clear answer on – “Whats wrong with having hyper targeted Facebook ad’s that I potentially may be interested in?” I’d be bombarded with ad’s anyways, so why not give me something I may be potentially purchase that’s based on my liked pages/websites.

Yes customization is scary and a tricky concept to grasp…its why MySpace failed (over customization). But the very fact that we’re able to so easily connect with others through social networks, for FREE by the way, we’ve got to understand that they need to have some revenue model to keep them in business and allow us to use their service…for free. Maybe if Facebook explicitly asked us to opt into sharing our data it wouldn’t be such a big deal? Thoughts?

Obviously this issue continues to dive deeper and spark more controversy every time its brought up but I think we’ll soon be at time where we understand that our data being shared isn’t the end of the world and that it in fact is beneficial to our ever hectic lifestyles.

The Problem with Location Based Services

Posted on March 20, 2012 by roexcalv

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of location based services, and we know consumers are out there and many want you to find them. With the popularity of Foursquare, and recently Path, they’ve become potential goldmines for important consumer data – what they’re day to day activities look like, who they’re with, and where they visit on a regular basis. And yes, there’s still concern around privacy issues, but consumers are still demanding that marketers understand all of their daily contexts to make their lives easier.

However, my main problem with location based services is the very fact they aren’t contextualized and that they’re separate apps rather than a built in feature of a phone. What I mean by contextualized is that the phone should automatically notify me right as things happen, without me taking any actions. Instead of the phone simply being a caddy, it should really do the actions for me…scary but awesome! Here’s just two user scenario I’m thinking of:

“If I’ve got a scheduled meeting at a different location, instead of generic 10 min meeting reminder, it should notify me to leave for 25 minutes ahead due to a traffic accident along my route.”

“If Im at bar or restaurant, again that I’ve decided to let check-me in, it should automatically notify me of others within my social network, who i’ve subscribed too, that are also at that location.”

Secondly, once the privacy issues are dealt with you, you shouldn’t have to manually check-in to anywhere. With the new technology of geo-fencing, I should be able to walk into a location that I’ve opted into, and it should automatically check me in. Yes this requires GPS in your phone to constantly be running in the background, draining the phones battery, but as we continue to make improvements in that area I have no doubt that geo-fencing will be vital to the success of location based services.

Is Google+ still a threat to Facebook? Wrong Question.

Posted on February 4, 2012 by roexcalv

Analy sts predict that Google+ will have hit 100 million users sometime this month, and reach 400 million by years end. Thats half of Facebook’s current user base.

After failing to enter the market with services like Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google set out to make connecting on the web more like connecting in the real world. With new and differentiated social tools such as hangouts, circles, and sparks, Google+ quickly gained recognition from the online technology community as the first social network that could challenge Facebook’s dominant market position. And by July 24, 2011, Google had already hit 25 million users making it the fastest growing social network to date.

However, despite the rapid growth, Google+ is now criticized for its inability to sustain the expansion and convert adopters into active users. Statistics from a Bime Analytics report published on August 19 indicated that only 17% of users actually use the service daily. With all the different opinions out there, the debate still rages whether Google+ is challenging Facebook’s position within the market. But I read an articlein November,by Pete Cashmore (founder of Mashable) and I think he sums it up best. We’re asking the wrong question. He explains:

“Google didn’t promote Google+ as a “Facebook killer,” however. Far from it. The real value of Google+ is a very small feature indeed: The +1 button. This little widget — Google’s answer to the Facebook Like button — is an acknowledgment that links are no longer the only way to rank websites. Instead, people are increasingly discovering content through their friends on social networks. For Google, a company that ranks Web content based on the links between pages, that’s a very scary change that undermines the organization’s core search-engine service.”

So as Cashmore states “Can Google+ beat Facebook? I think the better question might be “Is Google better off with Google+?”

And I agree, the answer is definitely yes.