DreamGrow Social Media

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.

Social Media Weekend: Case Studies, E-Commerce, Social Media Budget, Strategy

7 Key Findings On The Use of Social Media And E-Commerce: New Study. Online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise. A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.

The Compete study overview: Consumers Slow to Embrace Social Media As Shopping Resource.

Where Will Social Media Budget Flow to in 2010. Where will the money go? This post explores some of the avenue where social media budget will flow to this year.

Case Study: Social Networking Does Work. M+R Strategic Services released their 2010 NonProfit Social Media Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Growth and Social Engagement Metrics for Nonprofit Organizations. The findings in the study are quite re-assuring for some of the best practices we already know.

Paul Gillin’s Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools. Most companies have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap and easy way to build their brand and bring in sales? Social media demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough.

B2B Case Study: How to Get Started in Social Media. The second in a series of “How To’s” to help you add social media to your integrated marketing communications program. Integrated Marcom Minute interviewed Katherine Watkins, Marketing Communications Manager, Eastman Chemical Company, to learn how she and her marcom team integrated social media into their marcom mix.

Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise. Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.

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: Facebook vs Twitter, Sports, Olympics, Ski Resorts, Retailers

Olympics’ Social Rings. TV may still be the big marketing vehicle around the Olympics, but sponsors use social media to build buzz and get fans involved.

“People are blogging with their phones and taking photos with them,” says David Steel, svp of strategic marketing, Samsung Electronics America. “The timing seems perfect to have a program oriented around mobile social networking.”

A Third of Adults Now Post to Sites Like Facebook, Twitter Once a Week. The ranks of these networkers, dubbed “conversationalists” in a report released today by Forrester Research, have grown in the past couple of years. They’re mostly women, and they aren’t only young people — 70% of the adults in this category are 30 and older.

Ski Resorts and Snow Reports and Social Media: A match made in heaven? The Top 10 North American Ski Resorts Utilizing Social Media.

Retailers Lure Moms with Social Media, Free Stuff. The study found that women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook (60.3%), MySpace (42.4%) and Twitter (16.5%) than average adults (50.2%, 34.4%, 15.0%, respectively). Moreover, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

Study Reveals Facebook Better Than Twitter for Marketers. Can’t say that it surprises me. Facebook encourages users to aggregate external content on Facebook to be viewed within the network, while Twitter encourages users to link externally, viewing content outside of the network.

Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year.

People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.

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 weekend: Seth Godin, relationships, marketing is dead

Another collection of articles for people who want to stay up to date in all things social. Seth GOdin has released agreat free ebook. Marketing will die. What is a relationship and 50 tactics for social media. Share and enjoy.

What Matters Now: get the free ebook from Seth Godin. Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up. Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. Seth’s new ebook will get you started on that path. A page from 60 great thinkers. (Download PDF now).

Be of service. Always. Excellence! Never an exception! If not Excellence, what? — Tom Peters in the ebook

50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits

2010: The Year Marketing Dies… (Subtitled) Or at Least Marketing as We Know It! If marketing burns to the ground in 2010, a new and more powerful marketing will rise from the ashes. The role of the new marketer:

• Won’t be merely to imagine creative messages but to fashion programs that are seamless with the actual product and service experience,
• Won’t be to plan bursts of communication on a yearlong calendar but to respond to and be part of the ever-changing dialog with consumers,
• Won’t be merely to talk at consumers but to listen and engage one to one,
• Won’t be to build campaigns but relationships…

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. The same change is taking place in advertising and marketing. Control is an illusion.

Social media-powered show to hit Web. From creator of ‘American Idol’ comes ‘If I Can Dream,’ a social media approach to entertainment. If I Can Dream. Ehh… I had similar idea with my friend. Interaction, between characters across all social media in real-time. In addition to that regular TV appearances that are backed by YouTube and Hulu. This project seems to bypass regular TV. Ideas cost nothing, innovation is in doing…

Relationships Aren’t Universal. You, as a business, may have all the best intentions to forge a relationship with me, meaning that you want to talk with me, interact with me, get to know me better, understand my motivations and my personality and demonstrate that you value me as a customer, and hopefully give me lots of reasons to adore you and express that adoration publicly. I, however, may just want to get a discount, buy your thing because it suits my needs, and move on.

Social media weekend: Women, ROI, Social Sales

Another installment of resources for people who just can’t let go of social media.

Identification of Influencers Increases Campaign Effectiveness by 50%. Vibrant customer communities enable companies to identify their most influenctial customers through behavioral profiling and social network analysis (SNA) techniques, and are therefore vital tools not only for their immediate benefits in member-driven support, promotion, and innovation, but as a means for attracting customers to serve as influencers in future marketing campaigns. Here’s the PDF(http://www.lithium.com/pdfs/whitepapers/Building-Customer-Networks-for-Successful-Word-of-Mouth-Marketing_DNn9P5Hp.pdf).

US Women in Social Networks, 2nd Annual Social Media Study (PDF). 86% of women have a profile on a social networking website, up 48% since last year. This increase is even greater for older women (126%), whose participation grew from 31% to 70%. Women under 30 boast a 96% participation rate on social networks. Facebook overshadows all other social networking websites.

2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study (PDF). Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on 2,948 valid responses to our online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during August and early September, 2009, the results provide a very useful benchmark for where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media across different activities and sites. Registration page, if PDF does’nt work.

Dell drives $6.5 million in revenue from Twitter. @DellOutlet is now close to 1.5 million followers on Twitter, and back in June we indicated that @DellOutlet earned $3 million in revenue from Twitter. Today it’s not just Dell Outlet having success connecting with customers on Twitter. In total, Dell’s global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue.

The Art of Social Sales: Sales 2.0 Strategies in 5 Industries. Learn how high-tech, non-profits, retail, sports and telcos leverage new strategies to engage with customers. Develop strategies to use social networks to generate leads and cultivate relationships. Learn how companies like newScale and ConnectandSell are using LinkedIn and Twitter. Participate in the conversations that your newly empowered consumers are having.

Marketing Shifts: By 2014, Interactive Spend Hits $55 Bil. Interactive marketing will approach $55 billion and will represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 — benefiting from search, online display, email marketing, social media and mobile marketing, per Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Forecast. I believ this number to be much higher as we factor in other budgets that are connected to e-channels: salaries and IT.
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Image credit: Ivan Petrov