Tag Archives: social media

Answer – How effective is Social Media?

This is one answer to a bunch of questions that I posted here on social media, more answers to follow to that post in the future.

First the easiest way to answer this question; How effective is Social Media? is to demonstrate it:

Go to Google and type in: How effective is social media?

Google doing what it does best comes back with a nice varied selection of articles. From the good side to the bad side and the ugly of course.

On the good side you have

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research recently met experts in the field to discuss how effective social media is in a recession

Article here:

On the bad Side:

Social media “struggling for effective metrics” Just what is success and how do you measure it click here for the article

And the ugly:

Leon Apel makes a case that all the time and effort may not be worth it:

Article here:

There are many other results on the page that are worth looking at, this is just my selection.

I posted the same question in this forum: http://workconnexions.com/node/35#comment-153

Leveraging Social Media

Leveraging Social Media

What do all these people love?






Yup, you guess it, we’re all big fans of Pringles. Ted Murphy from Izea posted to Twitter that he was looking for some Pringlish pictures for his presentation at Cincinnati AMA Digital Marketing Summit and he got responses from Drew, Corrin, Connie and yours truly. It was great fun to do and Ted’s presentation went very well. Here are some comments from the blogosphere:

From: R.O. Why! Marketing:

Ted gave some very helpful pointers on how to get started in the maze of social media opportunities. While we’re all caught up in traditional brand development and the interactive marketing programs we’ve always done, there’s an entire ecosystem out there right now of consumers, fans, critics and their conversations that happen whether we participate or not. It’s time to get involved, and to start influencing the conversation.

My key takeaways:

  1. Start listening -What is currently being said?
  2. Create some goals for your social media efforts
  3. Determine what content you can draw from -Text, video, photos, audio, etc.
  4. Find content you can capture -Customers, partners, employees
  5. Decide what you’re willing to share
  6. Choose your platforms
  7. Participate in other conversations, don’t just broadcast -The most important conversations may not be those you start. Seek out conversations about your brand & add value to them.
  8. Create your own storm of social media content

Really great event, and I think Ted’s talk helped make some sense out of the social media storm, and gave everyone a few clear steps to getting involved.

From The Future Value of Business:

Ted’s message about blogging was all about making a personal connection with your customers. Blogging allows a company to show its human side. A company no longer has to be just a name and a logo. A company blog shows your customers the passion, excitement and intelligence of the employees who contribute to the blog. The company now has feeling and a pulse. The company can now show their customers that employees are engaged, content, and willing to share their work experiences. Great Companies inspire Great Work.

From Pimp My Keywords:

His topic, “The Social Media Symphony” was subtitled “Harness the power of social media to drive traffic and sales.”

Far too many people are unaware of what social media means and Murphy explained it well pointing out that social media is a platform and distribution channels that provide scale to reach millions of people.

Consider this: Murphy said five years ago only a few people would have viewed a video of him snoring in the backseat of a car. Today, however, that video can be easily viewed by millions of people. The potential is unlimited.

Today, with Web 2.0, the difference is “social” and is now about people, conversations, interaction and community. A huge difference.

According to Murphy, the way social media works is to “listen.”

Listen for mentions of your company or brands. Understand what your customers are saying.

Listen for mentions of your competitors. And, listen for mentions of subjects related to your industry.

These “conversations” are happening at:

  • Facebook
  • Friendfeed
  • Twitter
  • Utterz
  • Plurk
  • Brightkite
  • Tailrank
  • Techmeme
  • Digg
  • Google Blog Search
  • Technorati
  • CoComment

Murphy added that once you have located a discussion, you need to conduct your research (Who started the conversation? What is their relationship with your firm? What is their goal?), then determine your goal and never ever go straight into a sales pitch.

While social media does take time (and who has “time” these days?), you have to start somewhere and do what you can to get involved and participate.

Sounds like it was a great talk. I wonder if the slides are available for download anywhere

Value of Social Networking in Dollars

Just recently somebody tried to sell there twitter profile on Ebay. Strange as it may seem and almost laughable. He did manage to get $1,125 plus for his profile

Is this real value of his network? It may not be so far wrong. Moving into the 21st century more and more people will be conducting there sales research, people research etc online. If you do not have profile you may well be drawing a blank. People will expect to be able to reference you or check you out online. In the pursuit of sales I imagine that all these companies are going to be using these tools.

 

Would I employ somebody who is well networked? Sure I would.

The real value in social networking may be only just be starting to be unraveled, while I am not suggesting that we all start selling our profiles. I do think that individuals with well managed net works will be setting themselves up for whole lot more business at sometime in the future. As posted here by Owen, we may be related to every one much closer than we think. By networks in this blog post I am referring to social media sites, whether that is Linkedin, Facebook, community sites or a blog. To name but a few.

 

What do you think?