Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
The following table contains the names of over 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online… The left side column is the name of the organization, and it is linked to their organizational or corporate home page. The right side column displays a link to the actual document of policy web page for you to either download or review.
In a hurry? Use The Social media Policy Tool to get your social media policy in minutes. Answer a series of questions and instantly generate a draft policy customized to your business. PolicyTool policies provide a comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.
In february, HubSpot released a report about the state of inbound marketing in 2010. The report was based on a survey of 231 professionals, who were familiar with their company’s marketing strategy. With direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows, outbound marketing has gradually lost its effectiveness (and importance!) in the marketing strategies of companies of all sizes. So has inbound marketing been any better? You bet.
Some key findings from the report:
Inbound Marketing Channels Continue to Deliver Dramatically Lower Cost Per Lead Than Outbound Channels Do Businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 60% less per lead, than businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing on outbound channels. Inbound marketing channels are clearly maintaining their low-cost advantage.
Social Media and Blogs Are the Most Rapidly Expanding Category In The Overall Marketing Budget Social media and blogs are becoming marketing powerhouses. They are the fastest growing category in lead generation budgets and they continue to be ranked as the lowest cost lead-generation channel.
Businesses Are Generating Real Customers With Social Media and Blogs Are potential customers really reading twitter? Does Facebook do anything more than build brand awareness? The answer is “Yes!”. Over 40% of respondents who used social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, acquired a customer through each of those channels. Social media is not just for brand awareness – it can be used to directly generate leads that translate into customers.
The difference in Cost Per Lead between inbound and outbound marketing:
The difference between the Cost Per Lead of inbound/outbound marketing has been clearly understood by marketers aswell. When compared to the average 2009 Lead Generation Budget, the 2010 budgets for inbound marketing have been increasing, while the overall budgets for outbound channels have been steadily decreasing (down 5% in one year). Businesses rate every inbound lead generation channel as being more important than any outbound channel. This trend will clearly be continued in years to come and agencies offering only outbound marketing services have been steadily losing their clientele.
The trend to focus more in inbound marketing rather than outbound, is especially seen in smaller companies. With not much to spend on TV advertising, they have no choice but to turn more of their attention to social media, Facebook being the most popular from the group.
Customer acquisition through blogs is directly related to frequency of blog posts
Although it has been a common knowledge for a while, the survey gives statistical evidence that the more you blog, the better are your chances of attracting that necessary customer. We have also seen the same trend among our own clients. If they have taken blogging seriously and devoted some time for it, then it has paid off. An interesting finding from the survey is, that almost all companies blogging multiple times a day, have acquired clients through their blog. But daily blogging isn’t your only way of attracting customers. Over 50% of companies blogging only once a week have still acquired customers through their blogs. Not bad for an hour a week. And what the data tells us, the frequency of blogging once a week is also the most common approach among companies.
Traditional outbound marketing techniques have been clearly losing their effectiveness. People are spending increasingly more of their time in social networks, so these are the places to go to. Shouting out and hoping people will hear you, is not working anymore. What works is initiating a real conversation with your client and hearing what they have to say. Whether you do that through giving out good advice or something else, is yours to decide.
Happy Birthday! But does Twitter have what it takes to continue its growth? I have some doubts.
Twitter is not that special anymore. Facebook is replacing so many functions that made Twitter popular in the first place: Most of the socially active people can be followed in Facebook just as easily. You can respond to them privately or publicly and its even easier to share pictures and videos.
Active Twitter users might not be that active inside Twitter after all. You can post 1+ tweets a day, but it does not require your presence anymore. Status updates can be automated, scheduled and links to articles require only few clicks from the blogs. Most of the tweets are links to articles anyway.
Twitter is losing the genuine interaction between users. Twitter is not that exiting to regular people anymore. I hope, that in the future Twitter wouldn’t be just a playground for social media fanatics. To avoid this, Twitter has improve. Here is my selection of Loic Le Meur speculations, that may help to save Twitter from its slow death, IF they will be realized.
Twitter will still be dominant in status updates - it’s the motherboard on which we plug in.
We won’t be updating Twitter all manually
Twitter will replace SMS for millions of people
-it is portable and archives across devices
-you don’t need to remember a phone number
-you are not tied to a mobile operator
Location will be one of the most widespread status update
Talking to shops and restaurants via Twitter will become standard and will get opt in coupons as we enter a shop, based on location
There will be more devices publishing updates than humans WiFi scale, planes, trains, cars all posting updates
Hyper-local news sites with Twitter geotagging feature
Also, Twitter has an enormous potential to be the fastest news channel. Most news will reach Twitter before they reach the News anyway.
Lets cross our fingers and see, what we have to say about Twitter on its 5th anniversary.
Passengers trapped aboard a grounded airliner isn’t something new – in fact it has happened for decades and nobody has seemed to care. People forgot the incident fast, but the reason they were forgotten was that people didn’t have the means to tell the story. Until now. A passenger recording the unpleasant incident and uploading the video on Youtube is a new kind of threat, and a very powerful one indeed.
When Virgin America’s plane had to make an unplanned landing due to weather, passengers were left trapped inside the grounded airplane for hours. David Martin, one of the passengers on plane, decided to record the whole incident and share it with others on his social media account.
After the first announcements of an unplanned landing, he sent out the first messages. Soon after that, he started recording the incident with a cell phone, capturing the growing nervousness even among the flight crew.
His video has been spiraling on the web for five days now, gaining over 70 000 views since uploading. No doubt that it will be a headache for Virgin in months to come, since videos like that will usually stay circulating for a long time. Taking out fires in social media is something they didn’t teach us at school, but it’s certainly something worth knowing now.
In today’s world of ever-expanding social media, a reputation that took years to build, can be destroyed buy the guy in front with a video camera. So paying good attention to your front line will certainly pay dividends in the long run.
TV series and news capture us as we want to have some continuity and consume some familiar stuff every day. This is not new. But in the old media the content, however interesting, was not about us.
Social media is taking the next step. Our friends life feeds contain news and drama that is relevant to us. Familiar, friendly and constantly changing this river of status updates glues us to the social networking sites. What’s more, we can interact and become a part of changing stream and that binds us even stronger.
But what about important things like business, brands, marketing, etc. Well, that is not what people are looking for in the social networking sites. Most of the activity in these sites, most of the social chatter, is just that chatter. Nothing important, just people connecting. It is the background noise of human society. This chatter has been going on forever but only now we are starting to record it. The noise will get even louder as more and more people join in. Additionally we are starting to capture even more of our daily activities until at some point we will be recording our lives nonstop 24 hours a day.
Understanding the social chatter will help companies to see that they have no control. But this will also help the more sensitive ones to find ways how to direct the streams of this force and make it work for them.
So, for the foreseeable future, the sites that help us to connect and get a daily fix of social interaction will be like a pot of honey for us.
But if we approach social design from the perspective of what users are good at, we might be better able to think outside our own box.
Goals and rewards – Consider the kinds of goals you might set within your social application and the rewards that may be earned by users who reach them. These might be personal goals and rewards, like game levels, tasks, challenges, or points. Or social goals and rewards, resulting in status, ranking, visibility, lists, features and spotlighting members.
Moods and feelings – Give expressive users ways in which to communicate their moods and feelings. For example, emoticons and gifts, or icons to be used and exchanged with friends or attached to messages and content. These small gestures, while small, can be curiously compelling.
Knowledge and learning – For users interested in research, information, bookmarking, and more search and browse-related activities, provide ways to share discoveries. Capture those learned moments and make them visible — perhaps surface and validate experts and top contributors.
Giving and receiving – For users who enjoy social transactions provide gifts and a means of passing them around privately and publicly. Gifting is a highly social form of communication, and besides being kind, engages a sense of reciprocity in most of us. So it’s naturally contagious.
Helping and assisting – Some users are just naturally good at paying attention to others, and enjoy helping and assisting those with needs or questions. Design ways to surface these needs and create channels by which helpers can pitch in.
Reviewing, recommending, and rating – Users equipped with opinions and a sense of taste can make valuable reviewers and recommenders. Design ways to capture their contributions as social content. This can be designed then into lists, favorite, trends, news and more.
Asking and answering – In a world of search, there are still many occasions when users want to ask questions and get personal answers. And in a world of search results, there are those who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and help. But questions disappear if they are not captured and paid attention to.
Announcing and sharing – There are users so on top of news that furnishing them with means to announce their discoveries makes for an easy and effective way to keep social content fresh and interaction active. Topical organization, along with trends, help users sort and filter what’s relevant to them.
10 Best Social Media Case Studies. There are many companies have used social media to promote their brand to improve and some of those companies have achieved remarkable success.
Social Media Optimization Case Studies & Tips. Optimizing social media for search engines, presents a tremendous opportunity to grow social networks and build traffic to content that allows visitors to consumer, engage and share.
The 5 types of social currency. The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.
Social Media Complicates Work-Life Balance. Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.
As WSJ reported, Facebook will probably go public in 2011, once it has reached a year of $1 billion behind it in sales. So a bunch of investors were polled about what they think the market capitalization would be – The results came to be between $35 and $40 billion dollars!
Although, some brave analysts have even suggested that the amount would be $59 billion in 2011 (a market cap over 2 times bigger than that of Google’s in 2004), and up to $100 billion dollars by 2015.
Priit suggests that the time of poster-boy Google may soon be over. Replaced by the poster-boy Facebook. Over everything else, people want to communicate. And right now, nothing enables us to do it better than Facebook.
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.
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?
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.
Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
Passengers trapped aboard a grounded airliner isn’t something new – in fact it has happened for decades and nobody has seemed to care. People forgot the incident fast, but the reason they were forgotten was that people didn’t have the means to tell the story. Until now. A passenger recording the unpleasant incident and uploading the video on Youtube is a new kind of threat, and a very powerful one indeed.
TV series and news capture us as we want to have some continuity and consume some familiar stuff every day. This is not new. But in the old media the content, however interesting, was not about us.
As 
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:
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