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?

Slidecast: B2B Lead Genration Using Social Media

Great presentation with audio. This slidecast is a brief summary of many B2B Social Media lead generation presentations from Kipp Bodnar. The slides are copy light as that is his presentation style.

The important takeaways are:

• Inbound B2B marketing is lead generation
• Leverage your own blog as a way to optimize calls to action
• Take Facebook Fan Pages to the next level with custom offers and lead generation opportunities.
• Social media can help improve tradeshow ROI

And remember you really have to sell stuff to make money!

Best selling social media marketing books

I got cold and some idle time. To pass time I browsed Amazon to check out what’s hot on the social media marketing shelf. Get some of these and you will get new ideas and tactics you can implement right now.

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk, rating 4.5/5. This book isn’t interested in making unrealistic promises while glossing over the work involved. Making a living by building content around your passion isn’t simple and it doesn’t happen overnight. What it is, however, is fulfilling and in most cases just as profitable, if not more so, than your previous job.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) by Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, rating 4.9/5. Stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media, and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott, rating 4.6/5. Though it may not yet have affected the value of 30 seconds of Super Bowl advertising, PR insider Scott argues that understanding the growing irrelevance of marketing’s “old rules” is vital to thriving in the new media jungle.

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success by Lon Safko, David K. Brake, rating 4.7/of 5. The book will show you how to build or transform your business into a social media—enabled enterprise where customers, employees, and prospects connect, collaborate, and champion your products, your services, and your way of doing business.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, rating 4.6/5. Two of Forrester Research’s top analysts show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenues, saving money, and energizing their own customers.

Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business by Erik Qualman, rating 4.6/5. Social Media isn’t just for the Next Generation – it’s for every generation. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a media professional, a college student or a mom, social media will shape your future. Don’t be overwhelmed by it; read Qualman’s book instead.” – Jane Wooldridge, The Miami Herald

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin, rating 4.1/5. Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities for leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, readers. . . . It’s not easy, but it’s easier than you probably imagine.

The Social Media Marketing Book by Dan Zarrella, rating 4.8/5. This book guides you through the maze of communities, platforms, and social media tools so you can decide which ones to use, and how to use them most effectively.

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans, rating 4.5/5. Put the buzz about your business to work for you. This comprehensive, perfectly paced guide will teach you how to make social media an active part of your marketing plan so that you can turn customer conversations about your brand, product, service, and company into a sustainable competitive advantage.

Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business! by Paul Gillin, rating 4.6/5. A handbook for marketers and business owners to use in deciding how to employ the new social media for online marketing.

Image credit Zsuzsanna Kilian

Social Media Weekend: Baby Boomers, Automotive, Social CRM, The Economist

Free Social Media Marketing Kit. Expert guidance on setting social media strategy and how-to articles on social media tools and tactics in the Social Media Marketing Kit. New marketing articles and social media content published daily.

Baby Boomers and Seniors Are Flocking to Facebook [STATS]. A new eMarketer report shows that the number of Baby Boomers embracing social media, especially Facebook, jumped drastically between 2008 and 2009.

Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service (PDF). The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider.

The Economist: A special report on social networking (PDF). Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better.

Study: Consumers Are Not Annoyed by Ads on Facebook. Good news for Facebook: It turns out users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.

Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?

All together now. Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among 10 companies taking part in an ambitious project that invites brands to work together on developing new brand and product ideas and new avenues for research through in-depth analysis of existing data.

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Image credit Cris Watk

Social Media Weekend: Measurability, Top Blogs, Resources, Trends

How-to: Do Almost Anything Online in 2010. If you’re looking to improve your life in 2010, we hope you’ll find these 40+ How-To guides useful. You can find even more How-To guides and tips in the How-To section of this site.

CMOs Plan for Higher Social Media Measurability in 2010. How do CMOs link social marketing with real, bottom-line results? 120+ CMOs shared their biggest challenges, plans, and expectations for social marketing in this 2009 survey by The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice.

Social Media Blogs Top 200. This is the real thing. The best list of social media blogs in the world. Why is this the best list?

Social Media as the ‘Last Mile’ – The Internal War. First up is the internal war. This is what I originally said: 1. Jealousy from the existing marketing teams towards the ‘new’ social media team. This results in internal political battles that cripple both sides.

Top 10 Resources for Keeping Up with Social Media. You need to know what’s developing, what are the best practices, what are the trends. Everyone has their favorites, but here are some must reads. Sign up for their newsletters or feeds so you don’t have to go chasing around the web to keep up with them.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. Here’s our own social media trend prediction presentation for this year. We were really amazed how much feedback we got from it.

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero

Social Media Will Get Real Budgets

In our 2010 trends post we mentioned that social media marketing will start to get real budgets. Every marketer who hasn’t been hiding under the rock for the last several years has noticed that something important is happening.

In a recent MarketingSherpa study almost half (49%) of the respondents say that they believe that social media will eventually produce ROI. Seven percent of respondents already see ROI and intend to increase budgets as needed to get better results.

Emarketers Debra Aho Williamson estimates that paid Facebook advertising will grow 39 percent in 2010 and reach 605 million dollars worldwide. The total spend on social network advertising would grow to 2.2 billion dollars worldwide and 1.3 billion in US.

But that is only paid advertising. In social media adaption paid ads are only one step and not very social at that. So we expect to see a lot more budgets to be earmarked for social media marketing. Building communities, setting up Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages, creating content, capturing leads, measuring results. There are a lot of way to spend on social that will be hard to measure or classify.

We believe that bigger chunks of media and marketing spend will be channeled to payroll to hire community managers, bloggers and other specialists who are a key ingredient to make social media marketing really social. This in-house part of the social media spend may take up to two thirds of the budgets. This means that the total social media spend may be more than 7 billon dollars in 2010.

In the same category the payroll will finance social media when engineers talk directly to consumers and support personnel answers customer questions on Twitter or Facebook. As the organizations start to open up, more and more of social media interaction will be an integral part of employees daily routine and this way “social media budgets” may look smaller than they actually are even if we include in-house.

Higher budgets mean higher level decision-making. This will probably mean that some budgets will increase simply by added frictional costs of meetings and consultants. But higher level decision-making will also put pressure to produce real and measurable social media ROI.

Social media statistics and data for the weekend

New empirical data for SEO and social media marketing strategies – measuring is he key to widespread corporate adoption. Really great post.
Without units of measurement it’s hard to experiment, and without experiments it’s hard to have data to drive conclusions. This is a sucky situation for the scientist in me. Recently, however, I’ve come across several sources of empirical, experimentally-sound data sources that do tell us how to be awesome at both SEO and social media.

Retailers use social media to advertise Black Friday deals
One in five shoppers plans to use social sites in their holiday shopping this season, according to Deloitte Research. Hundreds of Black Friday bargains from retailers such as diverse as OfficeMax and Old Navy already are being leaked on deal sites, even though the big sales blitz is still a couple weeks away.

Gen Y women share product and brand secrets via social media
Gen Y women actually are less likely to try something mentioned in a blog by professionals or subject experts (22%) vs. the 28% of a blog by someone they consider their peer. Gen X women appear to give them the same credit, 16% likely to try something new whether hearing from subject expert or random blogger. The original survey is here (“Why Y Women http://media.onsugar.com/static/imgs/WhyYWomen.pdf PDF)

Social Media Users Open to Branding, Marketing
After seeing an ad on a social media site, 34% of respondents have used a search engine to find information on a product, service, or brand; 30% say they have learned about a new product, service, or brand from a social media site.
Among Facebook users who have connected with a brand on the site:

• 46% say they are likely to talk about or recommend a product.
• 44% say they are likely to purchase a product.
• 37% say they are likely to link to an ad for a product.
• 27% say they are likely to post an ad for a product.

Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study
Nearly 65% of respondents reported using social media as part of their normal work routine,including reading blogs, visiting business profiles on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or using Twitter to find information and/or communicate about business-related matters.

Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Nearly 900 of your peers provided the kind of insight that previously has not existed. In this report you’ll find:

• The top social media marketing questions marketers want answered
• How much time marketers are investing in social media
• The benefits of social media
• How time invested impacts results
• The top social media tools
• And much more!

If you’re pondering starting social media marketing, these findings will help push you over the edge. via Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing Salary Survey

Most search and social marketers earn between $25,000 to $50,000 followed closely by those earning $50,000 to $75,000.

The survey of search engine marketers and social media marketers to get an idea of the current state of SEM and SMO. More than 100 SEO, PPC and SMM professionals participated in our survey, giving a window into their experience level, primary fields of expertise, and more to the point how much inbound marketers are earning, given the global recession.

via Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing Salary Survey | WordStream.