An Engaged Audience [INFOGRAPHIC]

leahbesajimenez : Congratulations @TweetupMN... Revolving around the Writing Revolution - Lingua Franca I’ve been following a raging debate in The Atlantic over the pedagogy of writing, a subject dear to my heart but clear as mud when it comes to formulating a position. The leadoff to the online debate, which continues through mid-October, was an article by the education reporter Peg Tyre about a new approach taken at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School. The follow-ups—more than a dozen as I write this—have been from people who have a stake in this matter of writing instruction. They range from the “Freedom Writer” diva Erin Gruwell to the president of Hampden-Sydney College. I recommend the series to Lingua Franca readers and hope that many will use this forum to articulate their takeaway from the debate; comments on The Atlantic site itself seem to be article-specific. Most people who write about writing are both passionate and competent writers themselves. That observation took me back to the original article, the only one that seems not to have been written by an advocate. Why not?

Rocket Scientists Aren't Exactly Marketers It’s been a long time since the world has been interested in anything traveling into space. But NASA finally grabbed our attention this week when the Mars rover Curiosity successfully landed on the Red Planet, giving us earthlings some crystal-clear, high-resolution photos of the surface. NASA had a lot riding on Curiosity’s success, and not just the $2.5 billion to fund it. But the landing itself would have been largely unnoticed, just another headline in the “science” section, if it weren’t for another recent NASA discovery: marketing. NASA and the scientific community have in recent history been poor marketers (just ask the Higgs boson geniuses). While Curiosity was getting ready to land on the Martian surface, NASA’s PR and marketing team were hard at work. People Don’t Like Robots; They Like People WALL-E, R2-D2, HAL. People Don’t Want to Hear Data; They Want to Hear Discoveries It’s all about engagement and making people feel like they are a part of the discovery.

A Best Practices Approach to Social Media Research « Research Design Review Last month’s post – “Insights vs. Metrics: Finding Meaning in Online Qualitative Research” – talked about “social media metric mania” and the value of off- and online qualitative research tools “that dig behind the obvious and attempt to reveal how people truly think.” In light of these remarks, it is good to find researchers who are exploring social media research design and attempting to determine the necessary parameters to maximize quality output. The researchers at J.D. The February 2012 paper – “The Validity of Social Media Data within the Wireless Industry” – looks at the volume and sentiment of social media content in relationship to results from their “traditional” syndicated survey. The March 2012 paper – “The Dividends of Improving Best Practices for Social Media Research” – goes much further in testing the accuracy in social media data and highlighting the importance of query details, along with internal quality-control measures, to the ultimate usefulness of results. J.D.

750 Words The Rise Of The Mobile-Social-Vertical Marketplace Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is a Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, whose portfolio companies leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, social, energytech and big data. Some current Mayfield Fund investments include Appcelerator, Fab, Marketo, Poshmark, Solarcity, and Zimride. The U.S. e-commerce market is estimated at $200 billion and is still projected to account for only 9 percent of total retail by 2016 (source: Forrester Research Feb. 2012 U.S. The Rise of Vertical: The e-commerce market is large enough to support vertical marketplaces that super-serve consumer needs and are defying the “winner take all” theory that eBay or Amazon will be the only game in town. Global? Platform Disruption: New platforms such as mobile are proving to be disruptive for incumbents and require a different approach. Successful marketplaces on mobile platforms now provide addictive, anywhere – anytime accessibility.

5 Reasons Email Marketing Crushes Social Media Marketing for B2B I know—how dare I have the audacity to hate on social media? It’s the way of the future! It will solve world hunger. It will have your babies. And very soon, it will even make your decaf soy latte in the morning. Don’t get me wrong. But you should not put it ahead of email marketing. Because all other things being equal, email marketing still crushes social media marketing. Did you know that email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined? In fact, if you imagine a full cup of rice is the number of emails sent every day, then by comparison, all the daily posts on Facebook would make a miserable 10 grains—barely enough to pick up with a chopstick. Not including spam. By the same token, every web search made on every search engine every day equals just 1/100th of daily email traffic; and all the pages viewed on the entire web each day—including images and videos—use only a quarter of the bandwidth consumed by email. Quality vs. Absolutely right. Here’s why:

Never Put Two Spaces After A Period Illustration by Slate. Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third email I get from readers includes the two-space error. A Slate Plus Special Feature: Never, ever use two spaces after a period: Listen to Mike Vuolo read Farhad Majoo’s classic takedown of an enduring typographic sin. What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. Typographers, that's who. Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. This readability argument is debatable. But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. Is this arbitrary?

Should Social Media Replace Surveys? | Competitive Advantage Marketing Inc Should Social Media Replace Surveys? Recently, there has been much discussion that social media may drive down the use of surveys and focus groups. Some have claimed that surveys could become obsolete in the next 20 years. That’s an interesting concept, but some of the talk may be hyperbole designed to attract an audience. One thing is certain, though: Social Media cannot be ignored. Platforms like FaceBook, Twitter, Company Websites, Blogs and Forums all provide a rich, valuable source of customer feedback. Dipping into this sea of commentary is the digital equivalent of eavesdropping at a cocktail party – you’re almost certain to hear something juicy, but you better have a sense of the context before you go repeating it! And therein is the challenge: How does one get the most out of the Social Media data stream? This Text Analytics challenge is the focus of many in the MR community. So far, the toolbox seems to be incomplete. The survey isn’t going away, though.

Announcing a Breakthrough in Measuring the Impact of Social Media on Sales Marketing-mix modeling applies econometric predictive modeling to link various media and marketing efforts to brand revenue. The resulting model enables a brand to determine its marketing ROI. Incorporating social media to the model is a logical next step. The Holy Grail of Social Media Measurement To determine the best approach, various sentiment metrics from leading social media data vendors were tested. This finding led to the development of a new social media metric, called Social Engagement Index, or SEI™. The approach involved five steps: The result was astonishing: SEI™ has an incredibly robust correlation to brand sales. Across all four brands, the correlations were in the range of +76% to +89%, more than adequate for predictive modeling. Figure 1: Correlation of SEI™ with Retail Brand Sales These correlations are especially impressive when compared to those of off-the-shelf social media sentiment metrics (Figure 2 below). Positive vs. Putting the Model to Work About Michael Wolfe

"the social" has always been there It is quite amazing how marketeers are now so enamored by "the social". But as early as the 1990s, I have seen studies that showed that "recommendations from friends, family, and other people" are as effective or more effective than any form of advertising. A former colleague was not convinced by it - to the point that she junked the research and called it "irrelevant and potentially, not valid". I guess the problem was, when you say "recommendations are far better than any form of bought advertising", you're essentially saying that "you don't have so much control over your brand messages as you have earlier thought". that "your brand is essentially at the mercy of consumers". the truth is, "it" - The Social - has always existed. we're the ones waking up to its power. the conversations are louder, the demand to be heard is more pressing, and the clamor to "own" (or "disown") the brands that we thought we had control over is not about to end.