DreamGrow Social Media

Facebook to be worth over $40 billion dollars next year?

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.

What do you think? Would you buy Facebook shares?

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.

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…

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.

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!