Social Media Won't Work if You Aren't Social

Authenticity vs. Authority Mark Olson asked a bunch of marketers to write a one-paragraph riff on Authenticity vs. Authority. We did not see what the other’s had written until he posted the responses today. Here's what I said: I remember in college there was a professor who had tons of authority. He was tenured, had written books, and was the head of the department. Outlook Sender's Time Zone - free plugin for Outlook 2007/2 Sender's local time upon replying or opening a message Have you ever thought how nice it would be to open an Outlook message and know exactly what time zone the sender lives in and when the message was actually sent? Then you could easily avoid awkward situations like writing "Good morning" when it is already late evening on the recipient's side. Try our Sender's Time Zone plug-in then. This tool will be a real helper for those who often converse with people in different countries.

David Finch When I was in elementary school my father took me to the most amazing display of creativity that had I ever seen. I was completely mesmerized by the lights, the acting and the way stories were made to come alive. As a young boy, what intrigued me the most was watching what I thought was impossible become possible with a few words or gestures. Traackr Helps Marketers Find Influential Voices Online We've crossed an important threshold in press, media, and brand relations. Big companies and brands now know that online voices and bloggers can be just as important, if not more so, than traditional journalists. As such, the demand to understand the space and find the influencers is higher than ever. Traackr just launched their Online Authority List product at DEMO to make it easier for PR folks, brand managers, and marketers to easily identify the top online influential voices — tracking reach, resonance, and relevance — around their specific campaign initiatives. The idea is certainly familiar, but the implementation offers more detailed analysis than most competitors.

Listening, for a Change We had an interesting conversation on Twitter a couple of days ago where Jeremy Meyers was saying that if organizations appoint one person to listening to customers, the rest of the organization would feel exonerated somehow from caring. While Olivier Blanchard's experience led him to respond that the way companies are structured, if you want something done, you have to make someone own it. Be responsible for it. My take is that there isn't a division anymore with the Internet people doing their magic, as Jeremy wrote, the direct response people, the public relations group, advertising, and internal communications. With the fast disappearance of a clear demarcation between personal/professional, there is also (or there should be) a more integrated approach to marketing and communications in business today.

Use Conversions To Generate More Conversions If you’ve managed to sell a product to a customer, use this opporunity to present further attractive offers to the customer. The topic “behavioral targeting”, a technique that uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that customers. Many advertisers believe that this technique can dramatically help to boost the conversion rate. Behavioral targeting is probably currently the most discussed advertising strategy. However, it is not clear if it possible to derive some meaningful customers’ preferences and future behavior out of the earlier purchasing history. Wrong adjustments – based upon the browsing history – can significantly decrease the conversion rate as well.

11.5% of MEPs are bloggers August 8, 2008 Some of our regular readers may have remembered that in a recent post, we mentioned that we were undertaking a digital audit of MEPs. The poor FH souls whose job it was audit all 785 MEPs will go down in history for their services to digital (thanks Jez, Ed, and Karen!).

Executives and Social Media US executives have come to value social media very highly to enhance relationships with customers and build their company’s brand, according to the “Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks” white paper from Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law. More than eight in 10 management, marketing and HR executives responding to the July 2009 survey cited relationship- and brand-building as benefits of social media. Execs also considered social media a good tool for recruitment (69%) and customer service (64%), and 46% thought it enhanced employee morale. Respondents reported using social media most for brand-building, followed by networking, customer service, and various research- and information-related activities. Despite high levels of usage and awareness of benefits, executives still have fears about the issues raised by social media. Such concerns are not new.

A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager Kat French You know, if there’s one thing I get asked more than anything else about my job, it’s “What do you actually do all day?” Because apparently, people think social media managers spend all day on Twitter/Facebook collecting followers and congratulating each other on getting paid to spend all day on Twitter/Facebook. Well, Bub, I’ll tell you what I actually do all day. Behold, a look behind the velvet curtain at a Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager: 5:30 AM – Alarm goes off. Google vs. the Real-Time Web Just how big a threat is the real-time web to Google? As Om has pointed out, real-time content marks a still-amorphous but important new phase of evolution in the web, allowing for the instantaneous discovery of newly added information. And Twitter and Facebook are emerging as an alternative to the traditional engine, which presents a big challenge to Google’s core business. As Larry Page admitted this week, the company finally gets that. It’s easy to imagine Google falling further behind in the real-time content game. The company’s slow entry puts it in the position Yahoo has held for years in search: behind the leader, always playing catch-up instead of spending creative energy on new advances.

The Illusion Of Transparency In Social Media Disclosure: Brian is a cofounder of the pay per tweet twitter marketing service, TweetROI. The concept of transparency seems to have universal support in Social Media. What Is Transparency? (Image Transparent and glasslike 41/365 by brewedfreshdaily from Flickr, Creative Commons) There has been a fair amount of discussion about social media transparency in the last few months: The controversy over IZEA's paid blog postingsMore recently, Chris Brogan discussed with his Twitter followers whether when he tweets about one of his social media clients, should he disclose the nature of his relationship with themThere has been little acceptance for Magpie, the service that pays Twitterers to accept ads in their tweetstream, and it uses hashtags to disclose the paid nature of the tweets.This article posits that we are transparent in real life, so why be different in social media?

Publications Panel: Social Media Should Be Weaved Into All Marketing 09/22/2009 NBCU To Debut Digital Video Programs Boosting its original digital/Internet programming, NBCUniversal announced a new slate of shows to be promoted on its linear TV channels -- as well as being offered in cross-media deals with linear TV advertisers. ... Magazine Ad Pages Fall 4% The long, steady decline of print advertising continued in the first quarter of the year, according to the latest figures from the Publishers Information Bureau, which tallied total magazine ad pages at 28,567 -- down 4% ... DOOH Revenues Rise 13% In 2013 While the Internet is still the fastest-growing medium with a 15.7% increase in 2013, digital out-of-home video isn't far behind. How Social Networking Helps Service Orien “It turns out that SOA is not a system integration problem, it is a social integration problem of getting people to play well with others.” - Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG Simplicity is wonderful, and most companies worth their salt are pursuing strategies to better streamline, simplify and standardize their environments and the ways they do business.