Location Sharing à la Foursquare – the Latest in Social Media
Facebook makes a business out of helping you tell people who you are; Twitter makes it out of telling people what you have on your mind at any given moment; there probably are other things about people that could be exploited for a business model, but Foursquare appears to have a particularly compelling status you can let people know of: where you are. They call this Geolocation; and Foursquare isn’t the only player in this field, that is expected to enable lots of new services. Twitter,for instance, has a new API that allows it too.When Google planned to map out in real time the spots in the world where diseases spread, they said that this proved stupendous new possibilities. Location-enabled Twitter, could actually alert you to how many location-tagged messages are coming in from doctor’s clinics in any given area. If you have a political cause in mind, say, veganism, you don’t ever have to wait for a poll of any kind to find out what part of the country would be the friendliest your views – you can merely check out the number of vegan-related political tweets coming in from any given location. And then you could move out there, either to live in, or to participate.
What if you are waiting in line at your local superstore for a hit Christmas toy that would be just the gift you need, and it is reported to be running low on stocks? If people at different locations around a geographic region could put out a location-tagged tweet about what kind of stocks there were to be found in their local store, that would give a whole new meaning to guerilla shopping.
Any time you are in a given location, newspapers online could send you stories that were reported from that area in the last day. Or, you could be given a running subtext on your mobile phone, by Wikipedia, of all the interesting stuff that it has on its records, that have to do with your location. And of course,if there is a new story being covered in your immediate neighborhood at the very moment you are passing through, news sites could alert you to those too.
Google’s Near Me Now, a service that’s a month old now, runs off your mobile, and automatically finds all the top-rated entertainment, eating places, or anything else you are interested in right on your screen. You don’t need to manually search for anything anymore. It’s almost enough now, to put Yelp to rest with.
Corporations find New Uses for Social Media
If the social media aren’t hot-houses of product promotion today it is not because there is no one in charge of any business marketing department out there who understands how to take the best advantage policies in a phenomena. At advertising agencies around the world, marketing experts can think of nothing other than the whole hoopla around viral advertising campaigns on the social media. The mad rush for advertising on the social media will happen soon enough; but perhaps this may not entirely be a good thing for the open and friendly community that Facebook and Twitter have grown a reputation for. With too much going on that is glittery and commercial, social media may soon cease to be particularly social, with the conversations, the quiet atmosphere, that will help people latch on to an idea and make it blossom. But for now, here is one way in which they really are using social media in the true tradition of the community.Consider the Fiesta campaign that Ford undertook on the social media recently. What Ford did was to round up a hundred regular people off the street, to drive and review the latest Fiesta on Twitter, primarily, but also on Flicker and YouTube. It did work exactly as they planned; viewership on YouTube has been through the roof. Twitter has seen nearly five million impressions of the whole Fiesta deal. But the more important question here is,has it actually sold anything for Ford?
Companies do not look to social media to help them sell anything, although it must be committed that their Fiesta movement certainly got a lot of sales inquiries from potential customers. With the whole buzz they generated from this, they got lots of user input on how to improve the Fiesta, and make it better for the American customer. It’s easy for those corporate executive types to grow too insulated from the everyday people who make their company profitable. They gain a valuable ability to actually see the dialogue blossom between the car designer and car user, filled with the kind of urgency, the emotion that goes with car ownership. This has to be one of the best uses that the social media have found so far. Of course, GM tried it recently, and they were not pleased. You do have to have a certain amount of basic goodwill to go on, before you go asking people what they think of you.
Why Businesses that Use Twitter can Come Off as Needy
Imagine the scene if you will: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tries to drum up some financing capital for his great idea, and the venture capitalists keep telling him, “That sounds like a very attractive idea, but how are you going to make any money off it?” The trouble is that social media is about having fun with your friends; it is not about business promotion. Advertising and rallying a customer base around your product on Twitter may work, but not for every kind of business.
There are too many examples from the past of how businesses use a poorly managed attempt to look young and with it, and hurt the image of their business. Think the videogame chain owner in the movie Wayne’s World. A business school advertising degree cannot help anyone figure out how to be cool on Twitter. Some companies figure that they can just put their Twitter presence on autopilot: they just sent out their press releases to their followers on Twitter like automation. This can be the wrong thing to do for many reasons; people are going to figure out that you’re just sending them everything you have without thinking of the relevance to their lives. This is the reason people tune advertising out when it arrives by text message: it just seems so automated. The whole point of tweeting is to show people that you deal with them as a friend. You will need to approach Twitter as the unique opportunity it is, and think afresh each tweet, the way you would in any personal relationship. If you have an agenda to your communication, it will have to take a backseat to the personal message you have for them, every single time.
Many businesses that use Twitter, somehow feel that their feed couldn’t be considered happening, if they don’t have something to say every day.. You don’t want to turn into that annoying friend everyone has on Twitter that they don’t know what to do with. You can’t go into Twitter planning for it to boost your business. Social networking is a brand-new opportunity; not even advertising executives really understand how it works. The best you can do is to take tentative steps into it and experiment to find a solution that works for you. Experimenting is key; and it is pretty clear now that no single entity out there has really figured out the real secret yet to it.
Learning to Exploit Facebook at Journalism School
News establishments have watched the new social media overtake at their own game them a couple years now. And they are ready with their comeback now. The news majors are beginning to create new departments to exploit social media in their news-gathering, and traditional journalism institutions have formed their strategies on how to bring social media into the journalism classroom as a tool in news-gathering and production. Here are some of the top ways that journalism students today are learning to exploit social media tools.
News is reported on social media outlets by locals much more quickly than it can be found by a couple of reporters sent out to cover an area by a paper. Journalists are learning to use social media searches like SearchMerge, Twitter and OneRiot to be able to keep on top of things.
Finding a source for a story, a volunteer in a troublesome controversy, can be much more effectively accomplished with social media. You just put the word out on Twitter; with time you could have a list of informant followers on Twitter who could respond to your need for a source of information, quite quickly.
Journalists don’t need social media just to get their stories for the major news companies they work for; with social media, they can be their own publishing outlet. All they need to do is put out a blog, or gather a following for their honest niche-journalism on YouTube.The major media are doing social media on the side too as it happens; every major newspaper for example has a blog, and CNN has iReport.
Journalism schools today are encouraging students to get their wet building an online community; to pick a point of view and really put it out there. They gather a following and enrich the world with their work.
It can be heady feeling being given the tools of the journalism trade and a way to publish your opinion too. Responsible reporting is a major lesson being taught at journalism school these days; whenever one is a publisher and can change public opinion in a way that is beneficial or harmful to society, responsibility is certainly called for.
So Most Small Businesses don’t Twitter Yet?
“bCoz ^ is the way to go“, “Pastry smpls 2 b thnkfl 4 on Bleecker’s Thrsdy, and don’t drink and drive”: the first is a tweet by an independent movie theater running the movie Up, and the other is by a local bakery trying to keep in touch with their custom and get a following. The way small businesses figure it, the only way they can run against larger competitors is by making their message personal, with fun tweets sent out. Today might be a particularly valuable time to get in; Citibank did a survey of several hundred small businesses in the US recently and found that three-quarters of small businesses didn’t pay attention to social media, given how distracted they are by the tough economy. Twitter and Facebook certainly cost little for businesses to run; getting in now should be a good way to establish a custom.
But success in the social networking arena comes from finding a way of genuinely standing out. Some businesses don’t just use social networking to get in some cheap advertising; they read other people’s messages to try to see how to appeal to them. For example, a small clothing store found out through reading up on Twitter that sports fans like to catch the attention of the cameras when they attend a sporting event. The store came up with a shirt that had reflective-coated cuffs that caught the light quite nicely. They put the word out through Twitter, and sold a bunch.
The more buzzworthy a business website is, the more local blogs will point to it. That makes for excellent SEO, and can boost rankings on Google searches in your area. Innovative Twitter use is pretty good too; a plumber likes to put out word on his tweets, what areas he plans to be visiting the following day; a mobile ethnic food van put out word of the streets they will be passing through at different times the following day, and so on.
No one really knows how to measure the success of their efforts in social media. If only there were a successful Facebook app for this now.
Everyone Knows Twitter is the Most Popular Social Medium – or do They?
For success in the world of social networking, exactly how aggressive do the marketing strategies employed have to be? Get this, the hub that seemingly captures the most news on every kind of medium, Twitter, gets less than 2% of all social network traffic today from US residents, according to statistics published on Experia. Twitter does grow with remarkable tenacity, posting a ten-fold growth this year; but where does that take it – to a grand total of less than 2%. So what does the scoreboard look like among the social network giants? Surely no one could have beaten Facebook and Twitter?As it turns out, Facebook is unbeaten in what is almost 60% of the market. We have all been regaled with news reports of the death knell of MySpace for about a year now – how they departed from their roots in music in attempting to become a major social networking hub, and were snubbed by users for turning their backs on their musical origins. MySpace actually is not doing badly at all; it finishes second with about a third of the market, though it’s user base has shrunk considerably. The surprise bronze medalist in the race is the relatively low-profile Tagged.
“Why Tagged?” one may ask. What have they done? How could they have beaten Twitter? Twitter gets such glowing press and the best that Tagged got to do all year was to get negative press for an e-mail scam earlier this year and their hard sell tactics in getting memberships up. Perhaps all the hard-edged tactics have worked. Not only is this company getting sign-ups, it is also retaining those members with great page view statistics, time spent statistics, and financial profitability.
Twitter finishes last in the top four. Has there been a data error totaling up the numbers? How does all the great press Twitter receives about addictive tweeting not get it better rankings? It is possible, in fact that Twitter is merely a master at working the press.
Letting the Fun of YouTube Trick You into Lowering Your Guard
The thing about the Internet is that in sitting in your home, putting your thoughts and personal information out, you are tricked into believing you have privacy; and in a password-protected Internet life how easy it is to take for granted how vulnerable we become without it.
Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?
People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.
Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?
Twitter and FaceBook Search: The Latest Move in the Google vs. Bing Match?
It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.
Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.
Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
With the rising dominance of Social Media in the lives of consumers marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon and coming up with countless new ideas and strategies to target the supposedly transformed consumer behavior. However, social commerce strategies to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, once implemented have rarely performed as expected or produced measurable results. Unlimited targetability was the premise of both B2B and B2C social media marketing, but consumers turned out to be too unpredictable for such strategies to succeed.
Apparently, consumer behavior can only be best understood and acted upon in scale by grouping similar consumers together. Human behavior is fairly simple and simple models of behavior almost always outperform complex models. One-on-one marketing is good in theory but almost impossible to implement.This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”
Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.
Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.
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