Friday 29 June 2012
Facebook soon to allow users to follow specific app actions
Friday 22 June 2012
5 Job Titles for the Marketer of the Future
Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts recently declared marketing dead, telling a group of business leaders “the further up in a company you go the stupider you become. And the further away from new things.”
While I agree with his latter sentiment, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects marketing payrolls to swell by at least 13 percent between 2010 and 2020. So where's the disconnect? What Roberts likely meant was the old days of marketing are over.
If you want to see the future of marketing, just talk to a recruiter. The dramatic shift in highly-desired skills - from direct marketing to SEO and social media, for example - says a lot about where the industry is going.
Recently, I interviewed more than 30 marketing and recruiting specialists to find out how what new job titles they expect to appear in the next decade. Here is what they had to say:
1. Crowdsourcing Specialist: This role has two parts: listening and promoting. First, this specialist would monitor conversations happening on the Web about the brand and develop messaging that responds to customers’ voiced expectations. At the same time, they would strategize calls to action for branding purposes via social media –such as inviting customers to compete to create the best video about the brand, and perhaps tying the theme to something trending on Twitter.
2. Content Marketing Czar: This position would plan decide what content vehicles - such as websites, blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, social media and others - should be leveraged and how. At the same time, the content marketing leader would look for externally-created content about the company on the Web and find ways to leverage it for SEO and other marketing purposes.
3. Marketing Integration Planner: This position would identify ways to deliver a single marketing message, campaign or branding effort across multiple digital channels. For example, using a pay-per-click advertising campaign to promote a viral video, or using SEO keyword analysis to help craft a press release.The goal would be to find out where their customers are already interacting with the brand, and emulate their nonlinear, multi-screen purchase behavior.
4. Vice President of Marketing Data Analytics: This role would decide when, why and how marketing data should be tracked. This includes data collected through marketing automation, website analytics, social media, email campaigns, mobile, SEO, content marketing, PPC and other channels. This information would be shared with brand and campaign strategists who design promotions.
5. ROI and Marketing Budget Officer: Marketing budgets are shifting from quarterly allotments for print, direct mail and media advertising to constantly-shifting spending from one channel to another. Return on Investment (ROI) data is often instantly available–from PPC, for example–so marketing can be more nimble with resource allocation.
It’s doubtful every marketing department will need all of these positions. The point here is to show the future of marketing through the most highly-desired skills and emerging job titles.
“All the top-down, brand-driven marketing disciplines aren't dead, they just must be balanced now with the consumer-centric disciplines that require brands to ‘let go of the steering wheel and let the consumers drive,’" Protagonist Principal Tom Cotton.
Research for this article was provided by softwareadvice.com/crm.
Wednesday 20 June 2012
Twitter Update Will Hide Replies on Verified Accounts
Twitter announced today that it will soon roll out a design tweak that will hide @username replies on verified accounts.
Twitter’s current design shows all tweets the user has created, so relevant updates can often get lost in a sea of replies on the account’s profile page. This will change with the latest update — all tweets that begin with @username will be hidden in verified accounts. However, you will still be able to easily access these tweets by selecting “All” above the timeline on the profile page.
According to Twitter’s Blog, the new, simplified profile will make it “easier to understand what kind of content the user shares on Twitter.” This feature will be super helpful when determining whether or not you want to follow the account, and you can quickly see what the company/person is saying, even if they frequently reply to their followers.
Note that the update will only hide @username replies that appear at the beginning of the tweet. Those @username replies that are inserted at the end of the tweet (or after a period) will still appear on the profile page.
Expect to see this new feature on your favorite verified accounts over the next couple of weeks.
Monday 18 June 2012
What’s Your Social Media Strategy?
It’s a simple question really: “What’s your social media strategy?” And I ask people all of the time. I’m a little surprised at the deer in the headlights looks or deafening silence on the conference call as a response.
Too often we’re trapped in the tactics and we forget the strategy element of what we’re trying trying to achieve. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on the best social media strategies.
Typically social media strategies fall into the following categories:
- Business:
- Increase Sales – Driving revenue with social media.
- Increase Brick and Mortar Traffic- Using social media to drive visitors to a venue.
- Increase Web Traffic- Using social media to drive visitors to a website.
- Connections:
- Raise Brand Awareness- Cause the audience to be exposed to your brand promise via social media.
- Manage Brand Reputation- To monitor and respond to questions and challenges to the brand perception in the market.
- Promote Word of Mouth- To engage with the brand advocates and influencers and activate them to spread the word of your brand.
It’s seems that those in the first group, Business expect results sooner. Dollars and traffic are easy to measure and most businesses can see a result or lack of one fairly quickly. Business oriented social strategies seem to fail more often and more quickly than those in the Connections group. Is this because social media doesn’t return measurable hard dollar ROI for companies? Or is it because social media is inherently more suited to softer objectives, rather than hard dollar goals?
We’ve all heard that social media is like a cocktail party, and that it’s not the place for a hard sell. The question is can social media managers execute a soft sell approach with a strategic goal like those in the Business section? I think that for many managers it’s a very difficult thing to do. Most will not be able to resist the temptations and pressures associated with chasing these hard metrics. In pursuit of the hard numbers (more people on the website, in the stores, or buying things) the marketing mangers will resort to harder and harder tactics in social media. These are the very tactics that are most poorly received in the soft sell world of word of mouth. Therefore, these managers will ultimately fail because they are pursuing a poor strategy which is not well suited to social media.
Conversely, managers with objectives such as increase word of mouth, or raise brand awareness are well suited to a natural discussion. These managers can engage with a tactical advantage over their competitors who are pursuing dollars because they are there to converse, not sell. These conversations are certain to lead to sales in the long run but it will take more time.
In my opinion social media is about building relationships with your audience. It takes time and patience to build relationships. If you don’t believe me, try asking the boy/girl to marry you after the first date. It never works. As does asking your social media audience to do something for you, or buy your product if you’ve not built a relationship with them first.
In my mind, the most successful social media strategies target the Connections first and then seek to activate these relationships to achieve business goals. Give me 1 good reason why you should pursue Business before Connecting with your customer?
Friday 15 June 2012
Facebook allowing advertisers to use your browsing data
Wednesday 13 June 2012
52 Social Media Facts - Blow Your Mind
1. 85% of women are annoyed by their friends (note – I don’t think this is just limited to Facebook!!).
2. Links about sex are shared 90% more than any other link.
3. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.
4. 25% of users don’t bother with any kind of privacy control.
5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
6. 750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.
7. The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams.
8. If Twitter was a country, it’d be the 12th largest in the world.
9. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.
10. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).
11. Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.
12. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.
13. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.
14. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.
15. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups.
YouTube
16. YouTube was founded to share dinner clips of a party due to the files being too large for email.
17. The most watched video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with 470 million views.
18. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again, with over 458 million views.
19. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.
20. It originally started life as a dating site and was influenced by the Hot Or Not website.
Blogging
21. 3 million new blogs come online every month.
22. 60% of bloggers are aged between 25-44.
23. 20% of bloggers have been blogging for more than 6 years.
24. Professional bloggers upkeep an average of four blogs.
25. 35% of corporate bloggers worked in a journalism, media or professional writing role.
26. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
27. Users spend an average of just under 16 minutes on the site.
28. The most popular age group is 25-34 year olds, accounting for 27.4% of the user base.
29. Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.
30. 97% of the fans of Pinterest’s Facebook page are women.
31. 25% of Instagram users upload more than three pictures.
32. Over 5 million images are uploaded every day.
33. President Obama is on Instagram, having joined in January 2012.
34. Earlybird is the most popular filter, with 12.5% users preferring it (zero filters is the most popular way to use Instagram, with more than 47% of users going au naturel).
35. There are 575 Likes per second.
Google+
36. “Student” is the number one occupation of Google+ users.
37. More than 2/3 of its users are male.
38. The Google +1 button is used more than 5 billion times per day.
39. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day.
40. More than 42% of Google+ users are single.
Social Media Influence Platforms
41. Klout has 50 times more traffic than PeerIndex, its closest competitor.
42. Kred tries to measure offline influence by allowing you to add achievements away from your online activities.
43. Klout changed its privacy model to allow opt-out from its service after a negative backlash in 2011.
44. Empire Avenue has users in more than 150 countries.
45. Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score of 100 (says it all, then).
Statistics: Social Media Today, The Next Web.
The Mobile Web
46. 42% of phones in the U.S. are smartphones, with 44% of European users on a smartphone.
47. More than 110 million smartphone users in the U.S and Europe access social networks and blogs on their phones.
48. Tablets took just two years to reach 40 million users in the U.S. – it took smartphones 7 years to reach this figure.
49. China is the number one country in the world for smartphone use, with approximately 1 billion users.
50. In the U.K., there are twice as many smartphone users than cigarette smokers.
51. Social gamers are expected to buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2012.
52. One in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online.
Friday 8 June 2012
Is It A Bird? Is It Is Plane?
Twitter appears to be killing two birds with one stone in what seems to be a clever rebranding from the social networking site. Not only does the new logo bring about a fresh new look, but talk of the new bird is bringing outside attention from other sources to the site.
The social networking site allows users to post ‘tweets’, short messages of up to 140 characters, onto their site which are shared with their followers. The site is very popular with celebrities and is said to have more than 140 million active users.
However, feathers have been ruffled as many people complain that the new bird actually isn’t that different to Larry. The bird has been flipped to face the right hand side, it’s feathers spruced up and the feathers on its head plucked, as can be seenin the top right of this article.
Here’s what the Twitter blog had to say about the hatching of the new image:
“Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry. This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends. Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.”
So the only question left to ask is: will the new twitter bird rule the roost?