DreamGrow Social Media

Social Media Employee Policy Examples from Over 100 Companies and Organizations

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.

Read the original post.

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.

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Image credit Michal Zacharzewski

Twitter. Its Glory Days Are Over. Or Are They?

Sunday, March 21  marks Twitter’s fourth birthday.

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.

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.

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.

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

Social Media New Business Formula

A formula for generating ad agency new business through social media. This presentation concentrates on ad agencies but can be use for mos t B2B marketers.

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.

400 million users on Facebook and accelerating

Facebook is 6 years old and reaches this week 400 million users. As Mark Zuckerberg announced this is almost twice the number they had a year ago. But the important thing is that the last 50 million users were added in about just 65 days. The growth from form 300 to 350 million took a whole 77 days. The average pace for the last 150 million users has been about 22 million a month.

Last year we predicted that Facebook will hit 700 million this year. We did some calculations and found that this is not entirely impossible. Now, looking back we see that Facebook went from 200 to 400 million with an average pace of 19,1 million users per month. Drawing a straight line from now to December 31 will give us a user base of 610 million. So, our initial 700 million is entirely possible.

The question now is if any of the big non-Facebook countries (China, Brazil, Russia, etc) will start to join up in big numbers. This may speed up the growth significantly. Facebook should start seeding by paying the user to join up in these countries and to reach the tipping point.

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Image credit Inside Facebook