DreamGrow Social Media

New Free Social Media eBook

In the closing days of 2009 Pepsi decided against hiring Justin Timberlake, Cindy Crawford or even Britney Spears to speak for them during the 2010 Super Bowl. They would instead take the $20 million budgeted and use it to talk directly — and to listen back — with consumers through the web. It was the final and perhaps the most significant signpost marking 2009 as a year where emerging social media technologies mandated new strategies for anyone who deals with the public.

Download the new ebook released today (Feb 23): Who’s Blogging What About Social Media in 2010 eBook

What’s happening in social meida. The “Who’s Blogging What” ebook brings together the opinions from several bloggers including Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology), and Mike Volpe (HubSpot). Read their thoughts about:

• What to expect in social media in 2010?
• What benchmarks can marketers use to measure social media ROI?
• How do you separate hype from reality in social media marketing?

What You Can Do With Social Media Now?

A collection of successful social media cases to show the audience on the Capgemini Cloud Computing Conference in Utrecht (February 17th) what social media can offer. And that investing in social media provides a return on investment.

Social Media Weekend: This Is Not An Interesting Post

This weekend I’ve been reading a lot of psychology articles. It’s really amazing how much information is out there that would help us to make our marketing communication and social media strategies more persuasive. Take the title of this post for example. It is based on the innuendo denial effect.

Innuendo and damage to reputations by Daniel H. Wegner, Trinity University. In the series of studies reviewed here, it is found that people are remarkably insensitive to innuendo qualifiers, basing their impressions instead on innuendo statements. The conditions under which this phenomenon can promote damage to the reputations of people, organizations, or products, and the steps that may be effective in avoiding such damage, are the principal concerns of the research.

Frist we believe and then we may start to think critical. You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read (PDF) by Gilbert D.T., Tafarodi R.W., Malone P.S. Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Three experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended. Test subjects were exposed to false information about a criminal defendant or a college student. Some were exposed to this information while under load or time pressure. Then test subjects were asked to make judgments about the target (sentencing decisions or liking judgments). Results showed that load and time pressure caused people to believe the false information and use it in making consequential decisions about the target.

Can you believe what people say about themselves in a Facebook profile? It seems that a little touching up here and there would be an easy thing to do. Make yourself a little better closer to the ideal self you want to be. The research shows that we are pretty honest about ourselves. Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization.

Why Do People Watch Scary Movies, Stay in Ice Hotels or Eat Bacon-Flavoured Ice-Cream?. Our minds love consuming concepts almost as much as our bodies crave food. Like our appetite for food, though, our appetite for ideas is only satisfied for a short period before we become hungry again, so hopefully this nugget of conceptual consumption will keep you going until the next click…

Altimeter Webinar: Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behaviors. Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li webinar introducing how we are thinking about how companies can understand their customers through what we are calling “socialgraphics”. Where are your customers online? What are your customers’ social behaviors online? What social information or people do your customers rely on? What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them? How do customers use social technologies to learn, make decisions, and support your products and services?

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Image credit Ivan Petrov.

How Well Is Your Brand Listening

Very nice overview on how to start listening to your customers (PDF). Blast Radius goes over the steps of getting your ducks in a row and see what’s important for your communication to boost the brand.

1. Listening better by defining what you want to know and choosing the right mix of techniques
2. Interpreting data through a practical framework
3. Expressing insight in human terms using personas and story-telling

With this holistic approach, you’ll not only improve the success of your marketing initiatives, but also quickly turn incidents like the Motrin backlash into lessons learned. And ideally, prevent the Motrin mix-ups from happening in the first place.

The PDF also contains a test where you can measure how well are you listening.

Do You Feel On Top Of Things And In Control (All The Time)?

This is not a social media post. It is about something I don’t know anything about.

Why our neurons make us think that other people are better than us? First off I have to admit that my knowledge about neurons is limited and can be compared to a cave man’s knowledge about cell phone. Still, I will give it a shot. May be some neuron people would like to use it as a research subject.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this interesting post about empathy, Gandhi’s Neurons: The Practice of Empathy. In that post is a link to a really good video about mirror neurons.

In that post one of the pointers on how to flex our empathic muscle is that:

Understand this Universal Human Fear. A fundamental fear experienced by most is the hidden fear of not measuring up. Recognize this and do your part to genuinely make those in your circle of influence feel that they are enough. It’s a powerful act of interpersonal philanthropy.

Now, why is that? If everybody is having this fundamental fear of not measuring up then we should measure up just nicely. This is where it occurred to me that when we actually do stuff then there are a lot more neurons in play than just watching something done. Doh! This is obvious! Here’s the idea, besides all the useful neurons also a special kind of neurons gets active when we do something. Lets call those omg-i-hope-i-don’t-screw-this-up-and-get-laughed-at-neurons or fumbling neurons for short.

When we see someone doing something then our mirror neurons get activated but the fumbling neurons do not. We feel and understand how the speaker speaks or snowboarder makes a jump. So we see others as skillful and confident. We think to ourselves, how can they make is seems so easy. But that’s the point, it only seems that they are at ease and confident. In fact their fumbling neurons work overtime to make them feel incompetent.

For many people fumbling neurons paralyze them and they will do a poor job at their task. I think there is a simple way to overcome this degrading effect. First you have to understand that fumbling neurons will always be there. Second, ignore them! I haven’t read Seth Godin’s Linchpin, yet but seems that the lizard brain that he’s talking about is made of fumbling neurons. The pat of the brain that makes you double check endlessly, postpone and not to speak up.

Just ignore the fumbling neurons and do stuff.

OK, let’s tie this to social media and social networking sites. I believe that if you can create an environment or community where people can feel they are enough and share their experiences then you will have a very good chance of making it a lively thriving system. If you find a way to communicate the fumbling part then people will feel closer together.

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Image credit lumaxart / Scott Maxwell

Link Building And Social Media

Social media is getting all the attention, but we must not forget that SEO and link building are still important. Most sites are still getting their traffic from search engines. When social networking site mature we will see more and more traffic originating from those sources, but right now you shouldn’t forget link building.

May be link building is not as cool as social media, but that is where you will get sustainable traffic. The good news is that social media will help you to build links. Here’s terrific presentation about linking and social media. From the presentation

Links are tha new currency. Social media is a linking machine.

In studies of the networks of citations between scientific papers, Derek de Solla Price showed in 1965 that the number of links to papers—i.e., the number of citations they receive—followed a Pareto distribution or power law. Recent interest in scale-free networks started in 1999 with work by Albert-László Barabási and colleagues who mapped the topology of a portion of the Web, finding that some nodes, which they called “hubs”, had many more connections than others and that the network as a whole had a power-law distribution of the number of links connecting to a node…

Dunbar: People limited to 150 friends, despite Facebook

Dunbar’s number is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships. Relationships where an individual knows who each person is, and how those people relate each other. There is no precise value for Dunbar’s number, but it’s usually set to 150 and our brains just can’t handle more.

The advent of social networking sites has raised a question, if this number could be higher due to support from technology. Seems like a fair hypothesis.

Professor Dunbar set out to check that. Initial result show that people whit lots of friends maintain close relationships with only a small fraction of those. The Sunday Times quoted Dunbar:

The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.

Another result from the study shows that women network better than men.

There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.

Well, I quess we already knew that, but this suggest that women have a competitive advantage in an environment where more and more business is being done through digital channels and social networking. Combining that with the fact that women rule the social web makes me wonder what’s left fof men?

When thinking about the current state of social technology I still wonder if it can be made more helpful for maintaining bigger or tighter networks. My phone helps me to remember hundreds of phone numbers and even with that information I am able to remember the connections between different people. What would happen if the developers of Facebook or other social networks would singlemindedly focus on helping to increase the Dunbar’s number in their network. Would we perceive that social networking site as better, friendlier?

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero.

I Love You!

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody. I have great friends. Actually, I am amazed how cool people are my good friends. Thank you. There are others. I don’t know them that well, but from time to time they retweet my utterings, they post comments on the blogs I write, they send emails and ask questions. Thank you, too!

Today I was thinking that I pretty much have it all and when I will make a billion dollars my life would not get a lot better (but i wont complain, I promise). Maybe I could just give back some more.

I actually had some witty and sarcastic remarks for this post about, marketing droids, the value of a brand as a friend, abusing social media, etc. But then, let’s keep it friendly today.

So, again, thanks for being my friend.

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And, of course, I love all the photographers who are generous enough to share their work on various sites without asking for anything in return. Image credit hagit.

Coke: Fans First In Social Media (Case Study)

A really interesting presentation by Michael Donnelly laying out Coca-Cola’s sosial medai approach. Michael is Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola. The presentation was created for the iStrategy2010 conference. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelDonnelly.

Social Media Weekend: TED Videos, News Readers, Evangelist, Career

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media. The best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the website. Mashable highlights a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

Facebook Largest News Reader? Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%.

Turn your employees into social media ambassadors. Develop a policy that outlines corporate guidelines for communicating in the online world. Encourage management to actively spread the message through social media.

Social Media Consulting vs Viral Advertising: Can All ‘Creatives’ Please Go Back to the 80s. Social Media consulting is not an opportunity to go wild with creative-led, viral-inspired, 60-second advertising. A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. What are the key characteristics of all social media evangelists? What make them stand out from the crowd and march toward the “alpha” category?

4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. Want to know what it takes to start, and develop, a successful career path in the realm of social media?

Study: Spending On Email, Social And Search Rising. Email service provider ExactTarget released a study this week showing marketers plan to boost spending in email, social media and other non-traditional outreach channels this year.