DreamGrow Social Media

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.

Gartner: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality

Gartner released a report “Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality” in which analysts offer predictions for the next five years. Concentrating on social software Gartner stresses five key points.

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This prediction is matches our own view of changes brought on by mass adoption of social networking sites. (Social Media Replaces Email and IM and 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010). Gartner predicts that by 2014 about 20 percent of business users will use social networking sites as the hub of their business communications. We believe this number to be even higher as social networking companies will push to make this happen. On the other hand email provides will seek out ways to turn their user-base to social networks. These trends will blur the line between social and email.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Our view is that in-house corporate microbloging platforms will not see wide spread adoption. The main reason for this is that small user base will not generate enough social chatter to keep the interest up. The second obstacle in the adoption of private microblogging platforms will be the resistance from employees who see it as another “time waster”.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

Well, this is a bit of a no brainer. We have seen it in our work and we firmly believe that IT-people should be kept away from making decisions about marketing communications. As Gartner puts it:

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value.

Social media communications is a business process. This process needs tools that come out of IT-department, but they do not define those processes. Business side must be very careful not to bend under the pressure from IT about what can or cannot be done.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

Yes, mobile is big! It will get BIGGER. But the user experience on different devices will (hopefully) be driven by delivering the best user experience, doh. Gartner suggests that people are more productive on smartphones than on PCs due to better user interfaces.

The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use.

We believe that small devices have inherently worse user experience than their desktop counterparts. This ensures that full size computers will continue to provide superior user experience. This will hold until we have perfected voice commands, HUD-glasses and other wearable computing technologies.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

The Gartner’s number 25 percent seems reasonable, but the reasoning does not. Privacy concerns will not hold people from analyzing social data. Lack of knowledge and initiative in the enterprise will do that. Our personal information is mined and analyzed in countless places and most of us don’t care. Agreed, social is more personal than that, but we believe that a lot of the benefits can be dug out from anonymous statistical analysis that doesn’t invade privacy. For more sensitive information consumers can trade privacy for benefits.

Social networking is in it infancy and the next few years will see a lot of change. How we communicate with friends and businesses, new business models and processes, new hardware technology, user interfaces, etc. But at the core of it is our need to communicate and belong. So, there.

Social Media Replaces Email and IM

In our social media trends post we suggested that people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM tools.

We haven’t seen any real research on this yet. In my opinion the convenience of using messaging tools without leaving the friendly social network will move a lot of email communication away from mail clients. I believe that this will happen mainly to personal email. When people talk to each other it’s only natural to use the tools that are right in front of you.

But not to fear, the email will stay with us some time yet. Businesses will continue to use email until some authentic way of private B2C communication channel becomes available for them on social networks. The second factor that keeps email alive is the rudimentary user experience of messaging tools in social networks. These tools are convenient but have only very basic functionality.

Now, a smart move for social media sites would be to include email in their environment. If a social network like Facebook would build a full-blown email client into its interface then Live, Yahoo and GMail would really have something to worry about.

In the instant messaging field the desktop apps have a lot more to worry about. The IM does not have 40 years of history behind it and the most used IM clients have only about 400 million users (Usage share of instant messaging clients). Well, in China they do.

The problems with social networks’ IM clients are similar to email. Rudimentary interface, lack of voice and video. But looking at my own IM habits it is not a problem as most of the communication is text-based and I don’t much care for the bells and whistles of the desktop apps.

Facebook can have a huge advantage by implementing these tools. So, what do you think when will we see the fully-featured email and IM clients in Facebook colors?

SocialTwist Social Media Sharing Trends 2009

Really interesting result for me was that: Analysis shows that the most popular channel for sharing content is email. Nearly 60 per cent use email to share content.

Other major findings

• Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.
• Facebook has displaced MySpace as the most popular social networking site when it comes to sharing content.
• It is clear that Twitter is perceived to be a news broadcast platform and not a “sharing” platform. It enjoys only 5% of “shared information” traffic among popular social platforms.
• Bookmarks are rapidly losing their significance in the social media space. Only 2% of shares happen over Bookmarking sites.
• When it comes to email services, Yahoo Mail is still the most preferred, followed by MSN. Gmail is way behind.
• Google’s services like Google Bookmarking, Google Talk, Gmail, and Blogger have failed to replicate the brand’s search engine success online, especially when it comes to ’shared information.’
• LinkedIn, as a networking site, ranks the lowest when it comes to social media sharing.

via SocialTwist Social Media Sharing Trends 2009.

Email helps to pave the road to social media engagement

A study from Harris Interactive and commissioned by Pontiflex found that only 12 percent of online adults are willing to share their social media profiles with brands. On the other hand almost everyone (96 percent) is willing to give their email address to marketeers for discounts, special offers and information.

2,064 online adults age 18 and older were surveyed. The willingness to share their social media information declined with age. Percentages for different age groups were

• 18-34y – 17%
• 35-44y – 8%
• 45-54y – 7%

This shows that email is still a potent tool to get consumers engaged in personal interaction. So, marketers should start with the email, build a relationship and move on to engage people in social media sites.

“Building a relationship in the social networking space is not very different from building a relationship in the real world. Once marketers have built relationships and trust through e-mail, they then engage consumers in relevant ways on social networking sites.” — Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker

Other interesting finding from the survey that support the use of email:

• 68% of online adults are more likely to trust a brand they hear from often and that offers them personalized deals or information online
• 78% of online adults said they dislike having to leave their destination when they click on a banner ad
• 47% of online adults said they have intentionally clicked on ads on a website

According to data from Nielsen:

“It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed — particularly for the highest social media users,” — Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen

The Direct Marketing Association projected that email marketing will generate an ROI of $43.52 in 2009 — twice the return earned by other marketing channels.

Social Networks, Email at Top of 2010 Media-Buying List

Email is one of the most efective marketing channels there is. Specially if it’s your own houselist. One thing better than email is peer recommendation and that is found in social networks. Recent survey from Center for Media Research, conducted with InsightExpress shows that marketers know that.

Having a “presence on social networks” is one of the top priorities for marketers in 2010, with 56.3 percent planning to include social-media spending in their next-year’s marketing budget, according to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study”. The number of marketers hoping or expecting to allocate dollars to social networks puts the medium second only to e-mail as 57.7 percent of respondents plan to use it.% “realistically” plan to include social media in their media plans next year.

via center-media-research-percentage-marketers-include-media-plans-2010.jpg.