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Sphere: Related ContentBenefits Of Social Networking For Small-Business Owners - Interview Notes
This is a response to a columnist who asked: “Is online networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) more effective than formal in-person networking (i.e., BNI, LeTip, etc.) or it is a question of totality?”
I don’t know that social networking is either more or less effective than in-person marketing so as much as it is different. I would say that it is probably easier or more comfortable networking using online tools like Facebook and Twitter than it is in person for a lot of people. Online, you don’t really have those awkward social moments; those times when you’re reaching for something to say.
The online conversations simply reveal what a person is interested in and it’s easy to jump in when you can add something of value to the discussion. You don’t have to be witty on demand; you can answer a question after you’ve given it some thought. Social networking is a great way to create relationships you probably would never otherwise have created because without Twitter or Facebook, you’d probably would never have met one another due to geography or any other factor.
These tool are also a good way of “warming up” a relationship before you actually meet the person in the flesh.
As business tools, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the rest are fantastic venues in which to establish a direct communication channel with your customers. These channels can then be used to offer promotions, product information, solicit feedback and conduct customer service. The friends you make on these networks can expose your brand to their networks and acts as an implicit endorsement. If your customers are happy with you, they will often tell their networks how much they love you.
It’s like the old Fabrege shampoo commercial: So I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on…. Substitute 200 for two friends, and you get the idea.
Sphere: Related ContentSteve Rubel On The Power Of Personal Brands In The Twitterverse
This is Steve Rubel addressing the 140 Character Conference and discussing personal brands and Twitter.
Found at Blip.tv through Albert Maruggi’s Marketing Edge podcast, a must-listen. Albert has a great interview with Rubel in his last podcast.
Sphere: Related ContentMicrosoft’s Uphill Marketing Battle: Googling With Bing
This parody of a Bing commercial from CollegeHumor sorta sums up Microsoft’s difficulties gaining marketshare from Google.
Sphere: Related ContentMinnPost Continues To Experiment With Online Advertising Formats
First there was the microsponsorship of David Brauer’s blog at MinnPost, Braublog. Now MinnPost is experimenting with “Real Time Ads,” essentially creating ad inventory for advertisers’ RSS feeds.
The concept is not new but MinnPost’s experiment will give us a local example that will fun to watch.
Publisher Joel Kramer discusses the experiment:
Sphere: Related ContentFortune 100 CEOs Are Bravely Leading Their Companies Into The Past
Dan Haugen’s excellent piece at MinnPost about Best Buy’s new social media savvy CEO Brian Dunn, points out just what an anomaly Dunn is, based on a report by the UberCEO blog.
In the last section of his article, Haugen warns that “By avoiding them, these leaders could be putting their own image and their company’s image at risk.”
I’d say there’s much more at risk than a CEO’s or a company’s image; their very future could be at risk.
The future of work will be heavily dependent upon the social Web and the working Web.
Disdain for the social Web at the uppermost levels of corporate America is unfortunately all too common but the fact that the rest of the world are using these tools in their everyday lives means they will affect both the marketplace and the workplace, whether the CEOs like it or not.
A refusal to at least try to understand the changing environment by corporate leaders can only create a competitive blind spot that will only hurt those organizations that decide to bury their heads in the sand.
The following presentation illustrates the aforementioned report. From the report’s author:
We researched the Fortune 100 CEOs in the US to see how many were using social media services like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Wikipedia. The results are shocking - not one CEO has a blog and only 13 have LinkedIn profiles. We found the top CEOs to be disconnected from the rest of the world. If they want to connect with their target audience and raise their company’s visibility, they need to change how they interact online
Found at SlideShare via MinnPost from Sharon Barclay.
Sphere: Related ContentHTC Hero To Challenge The iPhone
The biggest news about this phone is the built-in Flash support. The Mirror lists five reasons to love the HTC Hero.
Sphere: Related ContentThe One Big Thing: The Revolution Will Be Crowdsourced
The One Big Thing you need to know about this week is the role citizen media and the social Web played in reporting the popular revolt over the Iranian election results.
I won’t give you a play-by-play but I will offer a few thoughts:
Information Wants To Be Free
The first and most obvious thing was that the event dramatically illustrated just how futile government control of communications is. Sure, the Iranian government blocked Web sites but the methods by which you get around those blocks were widely dispersed. And though the government did slow down Internet access and cell phone service to make it harder for the protesters messages to get out to the wider world, in the process they messed with their own communication infrastructure, making it much harder for security forces to suppress the protests.
Citizen Media
Having expelled traditional media from the country, the government opened the floodgates to citizen media. Had they not kicked CNN and the like out of the country, they could have at least had some control over the images the rest of the world saw.
Most people, after all, turn to cable news for breaking news stories. By shutting off that venue, people turned to the Internet and found citizen media galore…and it was all from the point of view of the protesters.
Further, with nothing to report, traditional media had to rely solely on citizen media for information. CNN became the de facto public relations firm for Twitter.
While a great role for traditional journalism in such a situation is the one they played of curating, interpreting and verifying information, watching the coverage I felt a lot of defensiveness in CNN’s reliance on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
Jon Stewart, of course, captured that sentiment succinctly:
Nevertheless, CNN’s embrace of citizen media well before the event through their iReport program put the network in perhaps the best position among traditional media to take advantage of the citizen journalism:
Galvanizing A Movement
Two years ago, I questioned whether iconography could survive the Internet. This event has proved me wrong.
I watched the infamous video of the young Iranian woman Neda dying after being shot by state police. I wouldn’t have watched it had I known what I was going to see, but I did on my computer screen I saw a beautiful young Iranian woman’s eyes go lifeless as a result of government violence.
I knew immediately that the emotional power of that image could turn a dead student into an icon for a cause. And it did.
I have to assume that the video of Neda’s death along with the video of the government’s violence against its people helped to fuel and expand the protests beyond the committed “movement” types to ordinary Iranians appalled at what their government was doing.
Crowdsourcing The Protest
I think the most profound aspect of the event, however, is the role the social Web played as a collaborative tool.
From Twitter delaying a scheduled maintenance shutdown in order to aid communication amongst protesters to Google implementing Persian translation, organizations and people helped turn the Web into a tool to empower the protesters in Iran.
Suggestions to help the protesters were posted to Twitter:
- Encourage everyone on Twitter to change their location on their Twitter profiles to Terahn to foil government attempts at identifying protesters
- Tell protesters to rip down street signs to disorient state police
- Request for Denial of Service attacks to crash Iranian police-run sites designed to identify protesters
- Even point to browser add-ons that make Denial of Service attacks more efficient
- Tell people to Photoshop the faces of state police onto the bodies of protesters to confuse and/or uneccessarily occupy security forces’ time
The use of the social Web by people world wide to aid and abet Iranians fighting for their rights was breathtaking and points to the future of the evolution of the Web.
If Web 1.0 was about the presentation of information and one-to-many and one-to-one communication; and Web 2.0 was about connecting people and empowering conversations; the next evolution of the Web will be about working together, about collaboration.
Google Wave and other tools are helping to usher this era in but this popular uprising in Iran gave us a brief glimpse of the power of the working Web.
Further reading:
Sphere: Related ContentFinancial Reporting In Today’s Economy
A panel of leading financial reporters assess the global crisis and discuss the ‘perfect storm’ of events that led to it. Aspiring journalists will hear how to avoid the perils and pitfalls of the profession, and media observers can decide for themselves if the media is to blame.
Speakers include Charles Gasparino, on-air editor, CNBC; author King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange; Farnoosh Torabi, correspondent, TheStreet.com TV; Liz Claman, anchor, Fox Business Network; and Alan Murray, deputy managing editor, The Wall Street Journal; executive editor, Journal Online, and WSJ Television. Moderated by Jeff Bercovici, Blogger, “Mixed Media,” Portfolio.com.
Sphere: Related ContentFacebook Status Off
As usual, they identify another aspect of online behavior for hilarious ridicule:
Sphere: Related ContentYouTube Offering New Channel Designs
YouTube is offering new channel designs that are a vast improvement over the current designs, both in presentation and as a user experience.
All channels will be ported to the new version automatically on July 15 if you do not do so yourself before then.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Real-Time Web Inches Closer To Reality: Facebook’s Live Stream Box
Anyone who has observed online behavior with the advent of microblogging will have noticed that people will often converse online during live events such as football games or political speeches or television talent shows.
I have long contended that the last bastion of appointment television is the live event or breaking news. Facebook appears to be targeting that online behavior with the release to everyone of their Live Stream Box, a feature that allows developers and site-owners to incorporate live Facebook activity into live streaming video.
The Minnesota-based citizen journalism outfit TheUptake has been executing this function well during their coverage of live political events and speeches.
AllFacebook.com points out that we got to see examples of Facebook’s execution with CNN’s live stream of the presidential inauguration and TNT’s broadcast of the NBA All-Star game.
AllFacebook.com also says “One downside of using the Live Stream Box is that content posted to it will not be archived or accessible for any APIs. Essentially it’s a one-use chat room that you can throw away at a later point.”
You can try out an actual implementation of the service on AllFacebook.com’s page on this story.
ReadWriteWeb reports that the Live Stream Box will work within multiplayer games, as well. They also note that the feature “is built to scale; they [Facebook] anticipate certain sites or events having so many real-time updates that not all users will be able to view or absorb all the content in the stream.”
TechCrunch reports that “Ustream will be the first to take advantage of it with Ustream on Facebook, a new service to provide live video support to select Facebook users.”
The two companies teamed to provide live coverage of Jonas Brothers concerts last night that attracted a massive audience that, as TechCrunch reports, generated 1.5 million unique posts.
TechCrunch also reports that there will be a Live tab that can be added to Facebook Pages, which will house live content like streaming video and the Live Stream Box.
UStream is offering both a “free ad-supported version, and a white-label version” of the their streaming solution, according to TechCrunch.
NewTeeVee reports that people visiting a Live Stream Box-enabled web page will be able to follow and participate in the comment stream from everyone on the site who is also participating or they can engage in their own personal news feed directly from the page.
This is the first practical application that implements the idea of being able to bring your network with you wherever you go.
NewTeeVee also points out that the “Live Stream Box makes use of your social relationships in other ways. Any comment made through the app is accompanied by a tagline when it shows up in friends’ Facebook feeds, (e.g., “via Jonas Bros webchat”), enticing more people to join the live stream right as it’s happening.”
Inside Facebook says “Facebook’s Live Stream widget is critical to its partnerships with major broadcast and cable TV networks. We expect to see more integrations like the CNN and TNT examples coming later this year. ”
The Next Web asks, importantly, “if I’ll be able to share the broadcast outside of Facebook. If Facebook diverted from its walled garden mentality, now that would be innovative.”
This is potentially a very big development and presents fantastic opportunities for organizations and/or individuals who are involved in live events.
I imagine the appeal of real-time online video will only grow as live-streaming video capabilities become standard features of mobile phones and as video cameras get Internet access.
Throw in the fact that people love to talk about television (and, by extension, Web video) and the appeal of sharing live events and experiences, and you’ve got a recipe that is likely to be enormously popular.
Sphere: Related ContentBlog Marketing: Dayparting & Maximizing Your Content
In the next installment of my series of post about blog marketing, I want to discuss the frequency and timing of your posts.
Dayparting: When Will Most Readers Be Paying Attention?
Think about your audience and when they will be most receptive to reading your blog and when you’re most likely to capture their attention.
For my Videolicious.tv blog, I’ve begun a posting schedule of roughly 6 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 3 p.m., 6 p.m., and 8 p.m. These are the times of day I believe my visitors will most likely be most receptive to checking out the blog.
My 6 a.m. post is for those who want a little video before they are off to work but it also caters to those who check their feed readers first thing in the morning and/or dilly-dally a bit before they begin to actually work.
The 11:45 a.m. post is for those who eat at their desk and surf during lunch.
The 3 p.m. post is for that time of day when everyone gets a little groggy and can’t focus so they take a break for a few minutes to gather themselves before plunging back into work.
The 6 p.m. post is for those who check their email/feed readers right when they get home from work.
And the 8 p.m. post is for those who surf after dinner.
My traffic tends to start picking up about 6 a.m., peaks at noon-1 p.m., then dips gradually as the evening wears on.
This stable publishing schedule also helps to build a habit of visiting the blog or looking for new content among readers.
Toipicality: Taking Advantage Of Pre-Existing Interest
Google Trends is one of my default tabs in my browser, so when I fire up Firefox, it’s sitting there waiting for me so I can see what people are searching for right now.
If there’s breaking news or something that is of particular interest to a huge amount of people, I might post some video on that subject just to take advantage of the volume of search that interest is generating. The election dispute in Iran is a perfect example.
Posting such content makes it much more likely people will visit my blog simply because that topic is on people’s mind and I’m providing content related to it. These are great opportunities to introduce yourself to potential new readers.
Real life example: The Best Of Jaywalking.
On June 2, I posted a best-of video of Jay Leno’s Jaywalking segment for the Tonight Show.
Search traffic for information about Jay Leno was increasing as a result of his departure from the Tonight Show, and that popular segment was some of what people were searching for.
My overall traffic spiked with more than 2,000 visits on that day; it spiked again two days later with 1,700 visits and then tailed off to a low of 400 visits by that Sunday.
But the traffic spiked on June 2 not because of Jaywalking (300 people visited for that video) but because of video I posted about Bill O’Reilly and the murder of the abortion doctor, George Tiller. Controversy is a good driver of traffic.
Traffic to the Jaywalking post remained steady at about 80 visitors a day through Sunday.
But beginning the following Monday, traffic began to pick up again to the post with about 400 visitors and gradually gained steam to peak at 2,600 for that video alone last Monday. It appears as if the traffic to the Jaywalking post is beginning to taper off now.
While it was search traffic that initially drove traffic to the video the resurgence in traffic to Jaywalking was almost entirely the result of traffic from email.
The post either made it in a popular email newsletter or a bunch of people started forwarding it to their friends and it sorta gained momentum. I don’t know which.
Frequency: Giving Visitors Multiple Chances To View
Obviously, the more content you post, the more chances you have of interesting people in your content and the more traffic you’re likely to gain to your blog.
Before I screwed up, I used to post just once a day. With my new publishing schedule, I’m posting much more content so just by virtue of the increased frequency of posts, I’m going to attract more visits.
That is, of course, assuming the content is compelling enough for people to want it.
I typically post the day’s video the night before, so all I need to do during the day is post links to select bookmarking sites and my own social networks.
Finally, because so many people getting content from their news feeds, be it through a feed reader or in Facebook or on Twitter, this schedule gives me a better chance that at least some of my content will be seen before it’s cycled out of sight by other content in their feed.
What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?
Just because:
Sphere: Related ContentFirefox 3.5 - Video Tour
The new version of Firefox focuses heavily on security but also includes many new customization features. The most significant feature from my point of view is the ability to embed links within videos; this makes product placement on the Web viable.
Firefox 3.5 Video Tour
Firefox 3.5 Embeddable Video Links Support
Sphere: Related ContentThe New iPhone 3GS - Parody
Found at YouTube from jacksfilms. Says Jacksfilms:
Apple reinvents the phone again…and rips you off in the process.
For those who’re wondering, that’s my enV Touch alongside the iPhone.
And before you all call me an Apple-hater and such, let it be known that I edited this video on my Macbook and own a first-gen iTouch. I just think these constant “updates” for the iPhone are overpriced and ridiculous. So now your argument is invalid. Preemptive defense for the win!
Sphere: Related ContentCitizen Journalism In Iran: YouTube Videos Of Election Protests & Police Clashes
This is a playlist of some of the citizen journalism videos uploaded to YouTube shot on the ground in Iran of the protests and clashes with the state police. Warning: Some of these videos are very graphic and one documents the death of a young woman protester.
Sphere: Related ContentThe One Big Thing: Facebook Feed Search
I know I already wrote about it this week, but The One Big Thing you really do need to know about this week is Facebook’s forthcoming feature, real-time activity feed search.
The feature will allow users to search in real time the activity feeds of the people in their network as well as anyone person or page that has set their feed to be publicly available.
- Updates from your friends come before updates from everyone.
- All updates contain rich content in-line, from videos to music to thumbnails of shared links.
Visit Inside Facebook’s post to see some screenshots of what this will look like.
As I said in my previous post, this will be a vast improvement over Facebook’s current search and will give us at least some capability for monitoring buzz.
Right now, the only tool we have to do that is Facebook Lexicon, which is pretty useless except as a crude sentiment measurement tool. With Lexicon you can only see the volume of chatter for a given keyword.
With the new activity feed search, we’ll be able to discover conversations and find where they are taking place.
And that leads to engagement. And that is what we strategic online communicators call A Very Good Thing.
Sphere: Related ContentMinnesota Broadband Policy Seminar
These videos feature a discussion about broadband policy in Minnesota hosted by the Blandin Foundation and shot by my friend Ann Treacy:
Minnesota Broadband Policy Seminar 1
Minnesota Broadband Policy Seminar 2
Minnesota Broadband Policy Seminar 3
Sphere: Related ContentJeff Jarvis Discusses Brands’ Use Of The Social Web
Jeff Jarvis, blogger and author of What Would Google Do?, discusses brands’ use of the social Web at the Columbia Business School:
Sphere: Related ContentTwitter Search In Plain English
Another great social media instructional video by Common Craft.
Sphere: Related Content
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Blog covering all aspects of Internet marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, blog marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing & online pr.
David Erickson is Director of e-Strategy at Tunheim Partners strategic communications company.
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