Home Depot’s Social Media Community Manager, Tia Robinson, shares how they created an authentic voice and connection with their customers through their online How-To Community.
Superbowl, Toyota learns the hard way that social media and spam do not mix
Twitter is a great platform to get people stoked about anything, if done right. You can promote potato chips like @popchips does, and it could turn into a huge following for your brand and have fun doing it.
Or, you can do it completely wrong and annoy the hell out of people by spamming them on Twitter. Toyota opted for the second choice, spam people.
Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition
As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.
In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue (85%) and increase sales and partnerships (58%). An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.
Are You Afflicted With Social Media Proliferation?
Between Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms, the average enterprise-class company has 178 corporate-owned social media accounts.
That’s according to a new report from Altimeter Group, which surveyed 140 companies with more than 1,000 employees. Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter and the lead author of that report, says 178 are way too many, particularly because such accounts often lose steam after a while and go dormant.
“It’s just a poor customer experience, because it’s been abandoned,” he says.
It’s time to take a hard look at your company’s social media presence and pare down its accounts. A new Altimeter report offers an eight-point resource checklist to help.
Social Media and Disclosures, Learning from the Hyundai Case
Hyundai avoided a collision with the Federal Trade Commission on the treacherous social media marketing course. The FTC suggested yesterday that its decision not to recommend enforcement action against Hyundai for a blogger outreach effort designed to build buzz around the brand’s Super Bowl XLV ads could be a lesson for marketers.
Three rules of thumb for social media marketers:
- Mandate a disclosure policy that complies with the law
- Make sure people who work for you or with you know what the rules are
- Monitor what they’re doing on your behalf
Deluxe Corporation Project REV
Very interesting presentation by Deluxe Corporation’s SEM and Social Media Manager, Nathan Eide.
Nathan shares how they launched a social media campaign to create brand awareness and gain customer feedback and insights on its products.
Nathan shows how you can raise awareness to your brand, gather intelligence on your product and services, do product development using social media
Influencing the Influencers
Microsoft’s Director of Community and Online Support, Nestor Portillo, shared how they leveraged both internal and external social media sites to better manage their vast customer network and create a customer-centric approach to their business.
Drugmaker Merck challenges Facebook after ‘losing’ page
The German drug maker Merck KGaA has begun legal action against Facebook after discovering what its lawyer described as the “the apparent takeover of its Facebook page”.
The webpage is being used by the German firm’s US rival Merck & Co.
Merck KGaA said that the social network “is an important marketing device [and] the page is of great value”, adding that since its competitor was benefiting from the move “time is of the essence.”
This kind of happening has been in the making for a long time and again demonstrate Facebook’s disregards for due process and communication, something fairly typical of social media platforms in general. Somehow, the basic social media rules do not seem to apply to social media companies.
As social media becomes increasingly important to communicate with and engage a company’s constituencies, social media companies will need to be more responsive and accountable, and if they want to attract more advertisers, they will have to implement systems to communicate with their own constituencies, something their customers learned a long time ago.
This event though, illustrates and reinforces the need to understand that an organization should not build their online presence and strategy around the social networks, but around something they have actual control and ownership over, their website and develop their website into an interactive platform. They then should use social media to drive traffic to their website, something Facebook has been steadily trying to curtail.
This legal action from a major companies could benefit us all by making Facebook more accountable
Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay
Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.
Facebook’s estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook’s revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.
But most of its ads were for small advertisers, such as local businesses and small-scale websites, according to comScore Inc. Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising on a grand scale, and to snag the sort of big brand names who now drive billions of dollars to TV, radio and print campaigns
Social Media, Ethics, Disclosures and FTC
Andy Sernovitz, shares his recommendations on how to stay safe and ethical in social media covering the latest FTC updates, the fundamentals of proper disclosure, and how to make sure your agencies and vendors comply with your standards.