Tag: user

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Demystifying social media

As the marketing power of social media grows, it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment. Here’s how senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in predictable ways.

Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the world’s third largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social media’s power. Companies diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty.

We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many executives, particularly nonmarketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. It’s no secret that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet it’s often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations, which take place across an ever-growing variety of platforms, among diverse and dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, there’s no single measure of social media’s financial impact, and many companies find that it’s difficult to justify devoting significant resources—financial or human—to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.

What we hope to do here is to demystify social media. We have identified its four primary functions—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior—and linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions. Being able to identify exactly how, when, and where social media influences consumers helps executives to craft marketing strategies that take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage with customers. It should also help leaders develop, launch, and demonstrate the financial impact of social-media campaigns

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What happens to your online profile when you’re gone?

Three Facebook users die every minute for a total of 1.78 million Facebook users in 2011, what is the future of your digital self?

You might not know what happens when you die but you can control what happens online!

You are filling the internet with status updates, image and video creating new digital dilemmas such as:

Whether you want to live forever online?
How to protect your privacy after death?
How to maintain your digital legacy?
Who to appoint as your digital executor?
Whether You Would Want to Be Digitally Resurrected

Do you know the death policies of all your online accounts?

 

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4 Common LinkedIn Profile Mistakes

With the new year comes the time to clean up our desks, desktops, files…  and start the year on the right foot.

In the digital era and the social media era, we need to add a few tasks to start the year on the right foot.  It’s time to take another look at our social media profiles, clean them up, bring them up to date, optimize them and get them ready to work harder for us.

Let’s start with LinkedIn.  With an exponential user growth, I see the same mistakes over and over again, let’s start with some basic mistakes I see over and over again:

4 common LinkedIn profile mistakes

1-Professional headline:

Your professional headline is your brand, it appears next or under your name everywhere your name appears, in searches, groups… With your name, it’s the first thing users read when they come across your name, make it count.  Your professional headline will determine if someone will merely glance at your name or want to click on it and read your profile.  It’s who you are, what you want to be.

By default, LinkedIn will put in your last job title, is that who you are, what you want to be?  Will that entice potential business partners or employers to take a closer look at your profile?

Take as much time as you need, craft a headline people will remember and entice them to want to know more about you, tell them how you can help them

2-Profile picture:

Social media is a very public space.  Chances are, if you are on LinkedIn, you want to be seen and found, you want to network.

Would you go to a networking event with a mask on your face?  Probably not, then why are you doing it on LinkedIn?

Posting a professional photograph has a number of advantages.

  • Potential contacts do not like incomplete profiles, incomplete profiles send a message that you have something to hide
  • A photo helps potential contact remember you
  • A photo helps identify you are who you say you are
  • A photo builds trust

3-Public profile

Your “Public profile” is actually a misnomer, it’s your public URL.  Think of LinkedIn as a personal website.  Each website comes with a URL (Unique resource Locator), a unique address that  identify them and allows users to find them on the web.

Your “Public profile” as LinkedIn calls it is your personal URL, the address to your personal profile, a link you can add to your resume, marketing material, business card.

Just as any website address, your URL should be short and memorable.

Why short?  The shorter and the easier to remember, the less contacts and potential contacts will make mistakes (typos) when they search for you and the more likely they are to find your profile.  A short URL is easy to remember, it’s easy to add to your marketing material

By default, a LinkedIn public profile link looks like this:  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/first-lastname/24/9a5/766  Try to remember that one, spell it to a potential contact and have that contact type it without mistake.

LinkedIn allows you to chose a custom (also called vanity) URL, the URL looks like this:  http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/yourname*.

Which one would you rather spell, print or type?

4-Websites

By default, LinkedIn adds “My website”, “My Blog” “Other” as the links to your websites or internet properties.  LinkedIn also offers ways to customize the links.  Use that opportunity to rename them, use your website name, your blog name.  LinkedIn profiles are extremely well optimized for search engines, if you search your name, chances are, your LinkedIn profile will come at the top of the search.

As a bonus, renaming the links with the name of your website or blog will give them a lift in searches (SEO effect)

 

 

 

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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.

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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:

  1. Mandate a disclosure policy that complies with the law
  2. Make sure people who work for you or with you know what the rules are
  3. Monitor what they’re doing on your behalf

See full article

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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

 

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The days of low cost marketing on Facebook may be counted

It’s not a coincidence that Facebook first half profits doubled to $1.6B and the trend will likely accelerate.   Over the past few years Facebook has been slowly but steadily paving  the way for increased profitability

For the past three or so years, most of the changes Facebook has implemented have made it made it increasingly difficult for organization and brands to put their content in front of their “Fans” or as Facebook now calls them “Likes”

It started with the structure of the wall on profiles.  We first saw the wall being segregated in two sets of posts with the default view to what Facebook deemed most important to users to the last change in the past month.

The latest little known or noticed change in Facebook “Pages” has big implications.  As of September 30, 2011, Facebook stopped allowing pages to communicate to their “Fans” or as Facebook calls them “Likes” via messaging.

The feature that allowed page owners or administrators to send targeted messages into users’ inboxes has been removed, officially to , and i quote : ” connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible” which is through public communication on the wall.

So Facebook says.  In reality, it’s been a slow and calculated approach to remove free means of communications between pages and their followers and quoting facebook again, “using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience“.

If the past is any indication, we can expect that Facebook will find more ways to curtail free interactions between pages and users as an incentive to use paid Facebook advertising, coming around full circle, back to traditional advertising, only this time with a captive audience…. of advertisers.

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Social Media 001: Page or Profile? That is the question

As more organizations get on the social media bandwagon, it becomes more and more obvious that there is some serious confusion as to what type of page they should use for their online presence.

Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook (Google has only allowed a few organization to test the Google + business accounts and is seriously enforcing their policy of not allowing businesses and organizations using personal accounts), users are confused, misinformed or uninformed about the differences between profiles and pages.

Few users read the TOSs and who can blame them, pages after pages of boring legal mumbo jumbo that would put to sleep a toddler on a sugar high.

Not knowing the differences can have costly repercussions.

Before going public, LinkedIn was notorious for enforcing its TOS, especially when it comes to organizations using personal profiles.  Facebook was enforcing as well, but with the vastly higher number of users, enforcement was spottier.

One can expect that enforcement will become stricter again in the future as the companies start focusing again on quality versus quantity.

What is the big deal? You might ask.

The big deal is choosing the wrong format can be costly in many ways.  Imagine logging on to your page only to find out that your account has been suspended and there is nowhere to turn to have it restored.  Imagine having to do the work all over again, rebuild your network of followers, your content, earning comments and ratings.

What figure can you put on rebuilding your social media presence?  What is the cost in term of time wasted, lost goodwill, lost followers?

The rule:

Generally speaking (most social media platforms use the same basic principle)

  • A “profile” is a “personal profile”, a live individual, not an organization, not a company.
  • A “page” in the Facebook lingo is for an organization, company, brand.  Public personalities, artists, athletes… when using the account for business purpose should use the “page” versus “profile” for one good reason, they are usually doing it to promote their brand. LinkedIn has its own version of the “page”

Using the wrong format will also limit what you can do.

Due to their original design, pages and profiles have different built in tools and using a profile for a business entity can seriously limit your reach in term of communication, exposure, engagement, measurement and visibility and that’s the subject of an upcoming post.

 

 

 

 

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