The Future of Social Media: 38 Experts Share Their Predictions For 2012 What is in store for 2012? With only two months remaining until the end of the year, there is no better time than now to pause and take a look towards the future. I predict that 2012 will be the year that marketers begin to look beyond the buzzword that is “social media” and focus on what truly matters – building engaging communities. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. are great channels/tools for communicating and pushing out content but without a focus on fostering a sense of community, your efforts will ultimately fall flat. But you don’t have to take my word for it. The beauty of predictions is that everyone has their own. 1. The integration of a credible and relevant social media presence will finally be viewed as strategy, rather than tactic. 2. Engagement is going to be a key performance indicator and main focus point with so many platforms that users can “belong to.” Transparency will become more of a theme. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
Don’t be a robot!Scoop This presentation by Corinne Weisgerber touches in a very clear format on what separates aggregation than curation. And which, in my opinion, can be summarized by the human touch. While aggregation can be automated, curation is essentially the expression act of a human being. It completes nicely what Robin Good also expressed previously on this topic on his blog to specify what good curators did. And which I published under the “Curating the Curators” title. For us at Scoop.it, we take the democratization of curation as an opportunity: can anybody be a curator?
Why Content Marketing Is King | Blog | Daily Dose When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur. Late this summer, HiveFire, a Cambridge, Mass.-based internet marketing software solutions company, surveyed nearly 400 marketing professionals about the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, market, and discovered that marketers are retreating from traditional marketing tactics such as search marketing and have made content marketing the most-used tactic in their brand-enhancing tool box. Fact is, according to HiveFire's B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, twice as many B2B marketers now employ content marketing as they do print, TV and radio advertising, according to the survey. So what exactly is content marketing? How have you used content marketing to enhance your brand? Photo: Thomas Pajot/Shutterstock
The 5 types of stories that make good Storifys While covering Occupy Wall Street, many news sites have used Storify to capture on-the-ground reports from journalists and protesters. Storify, they say, gives them a way to help their audience make sense of the stream of information flowing out of social networks. The social news curation tool also helped news sites thwart last week’s media blackout. Storify CEO and Co-founder Burt Herman said there’s been a surge in the number of people using Storify to capture the protests. Social movements Several news sites have used Storify to enhance their coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. About two-thirds of the Storifys that Mother Jones has created have been about Occupy Wall Street. “I almost think of Twitter as Josh’s notebook,” Tasneem Raja, Mother Jones’ digital/interactive editor, said in a phone interview. The Occupy Wall Street Storifys that have worked well are the ones that offer context for readers, Herman said. Breaking news Internet humor, memes Weather
Infographic Reveals The Best Times To Post To Twitter & Facebook What is the best time to share content on social networks for maximum exposure? Should you post first thing in the morning? During lunch? At the end of the workday when people are getting ready to head home? And how do you account for the fact that you may have potential customers living in different time zones? A new infographic from KISSmetrics answers these questions and more with a new infographic called ‘The Science of Social Timing.’ Here are a few key takeaways from the Science of Social Timing infographic: The best time to tweet is 5PM ET1 to 4 tweets per hour is idealThe best days to tweet are midweek and on the weekendsThe best day to share on Facebook is SaturdayThe best time to share on Facebook is Noon ET Check out the full infographic below and let us know what you think! Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times.
Hand-Picked Content Is Marketing Gold | Content Curation Software Image by Getty Images via @daylife As people get used to the new Facebook “newspaper” angle (“we want to be your personal newspaper”), the masses are going to get a taste of what content marketers have been onto for quite awhile. News aggregators are fine tools for personal curation and research. Some are better than others. And no one really knows yet how Facebook is actually picking the “news” to show its users, so the jury is out on that one. But no aggregator or algorithm will ever trump hand-picked, people-powered curation. Every serious content site uses curation. When a human does this job instead of a computer program, it is obvious which results are better for the consumer. There is a big need for curation of all types as we all deal with the ever-increasing deluge of data on the web.
Managing Information Overload « Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution… Julie Wedgwood introduced her talk session titled “Managing Information Overload” by speaking about how much information comes our way every single day and how that could impact the way we introduce social networking into our (learning) business. The problem She used [Shakespeak to ask us a set of questions about whether we sometimes feel overwhelmed by information coming our way and whether we are sometimes distracted. There is too much informationToo much replication of information (Joyce Seitzlinger pointed out that is actually also a signal for its importance)Difficulty in separating the relevant from the irrelevantLack of time The first solution: train people Julie has done a few informal learning projects, setting up portals, microblogging (Yammer) and discussion forums. Now that the first burst of enthusiasm for social networking has died, people are realizing that web 2.0 is actually a huge time sink. In The Shallows , there are two types of information overload: My thoughts on this
What About Me? A Picture of My Digital Life Intel has put together a pretty cool dynamic infographic that uses you as the source of its information. You sign in with Facebook and optionally Twitter and YouTube, and it puts together a graphic showing you some interesting statistics about your existence on the social web. You can check out the app here, but read on for my impressions. The first thing the application will do is ask you to sign in with your various social accounts, and explain that “What About Me?” After this, you’ll get a pretty awesome diversion as they put the graphic together. Finally, the graphic appears.
Cleaning Up Your Readers’ Lives With Curation | Content Curation Software Image by bunchofpants via Flickr There’s nothing more satisfying in the office than sitting down to clean off your desk. Well, the sitting down to do it part isn’t always fun, but the end result is! Everyone has a different system of organization, but the sort-and-pile method runs through any good system. Picture your desk in disaster mode: bills,statements,magazines,catalogs,newsletters from charities you support,notifications of massive lottery winnings,other junk mail When you get around to organizing this, you prioritize things. The end result is a desk with a lot of surface showing again, with neatly stacked piles of mail and files you have made sense of. Image by Amanda Schutz via Flickr Now imagine sneaking into the homes of each of your readers and doing this for them. Curation accomplishes the same thing for your readers when it comes to information consumption. This is kind of an important function.
The trap of social media noise If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up. Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product... and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses. But first, we're told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem of course is that more noise is not better noise. In Corey's words, the conventional, broken wisdom is: Follow a ton of people to get people to follow backFocus on the # of followers, not the interests of followers or your relationship with them.Pump links through the social platform (take your pick, or do them all!) This looks like winning (the numbers are going up!) Leadership (even idea leadership) scares many people, because it requires you to own your words, to do work that matters. Relentlessly focus.