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Pedro Gonçalves

Rando's 5M Anti-Social Photo Shares Could Be The Canary In The Social Networking Coalmi... - 0 views

  • Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.
  • For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free
  • factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 
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  • Mobile usage is certainly fuelling this messaging-centric shift.
  • if Rando’s rise proves anything it proves that humans communicate in more subtle ways than you might imagine, and need less social reinforcement than you might think. And when you think in those terms, it’s not such a huge leap to imagine the shifting sands of communication eroding the foundations of huge walled social strongholds after all. Lots of little apps, all taking away a portion of people’s attention, could eventually add up to a collective social exodus from the old networks. At least of key youth demographics.
Pedro Gonçalves

Report: Social TV Market To Be Worth $256.44BN By 2017; Europe Taking Largest Share Now... - 0 views

  • The research firm expects the market to grow from $151.14 billion this year, to $256.44 billion by 2017
  • “The future for the television is social through integration of social interaction on the television. Broadcasters are developing and enriching social TV integration; they are targeting the tune-in customer, engagement and their loyalty to boost the rating and they are also discovering the social TV challenge,”
  • Currently Europe grabs the largest slice of social TV market revenue
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  • While some broadcasters are amalgamating Social TV within their own platforms; there are many, who are integrating Twitter into their Social TV platforms for enhanced custom experience and participation. Industry players such as BBC and CNN, on the other hand have signed deals with social networking players such as Facebook, as social networking companies are aggressively trying to venture into this space,”
  • “Social is truly emerging as a coalition of television and social media, wherein newer formats are being developed to enhance viewer engagement and encourage paid transactions.
Pedro Gonçalves

Why Insourcing is the Next Social Media and Content Marketing Trend - 0 views

  • social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.
  • This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.
  • The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.
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  • Where does this ultimately lead? We’re not there yet, but I suspect it’s predictive modeling, with internal social and content opportunity routing based on artificial intelligence and enterprise knowledge mapping. If we know the specific areas of expertise of each employee and can store that in a relational database, and we can also know via presence detection who is online and/or what their historical response times have been, we can use natural language processing (a la Netbase) to proactively triage and assign social interactions to the best possible resource in the organization.
Pedro Gonçalves

Making the Most of Social Media Analytics - 0 views

  • The impact of social media is harder to measure than, say, the effectiveness of banner ads, because social media are often used to build brand loyalty. A person may see an ad or promoted social media message but choose not to click through, then search for the product later, and finally make a purchase on a third, fourth or fifth visit to the company's website. While social media didn't have a direct hand in the click-through and sale, it did have a hand in how the brand made a conversion.
  • Too many brands - GM included - rely on likes (which can be artificially inflated) and direct click-throughs (which don't always result in sales). And while the industry is making strides to help brands better measure what they get for their social media buck, there is still a ways to go, Chou said. Social marketing by brands "is just terrible right now," he observed. "I can't tell you exactly what it should be, but I can tell you it sucks right now. People just shout."
  • Right now, marketers can’t easily measure a follower who doesn’t click on links or interact directly with a brand’s Facebook page or Twitter feed. That will change as social media tracking gets better.
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  • Chou calls the number of followers a “vanity metric” that doesn’t say much about how effective a social campaign is. Marketers can, after all, pay for followers. For now, the best way to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is to figure out which messages posted to Facebook, Twitter and other sites result in the highest levels of interaction.
  • A message that does not work is more dangerous than a message that doesn’t spur action: It can cause followers to lose interest. “Content turns into spam at some point,” Chou said. “At some point, if I'm posting a ton of crap to any network, someone might choose to unfollow me.”
  • Chou outlined four ways social media managers could measure the effectiveness of their posts: Virality: Good content gets shared. A viral video is cheap to make and can bring your message to new eyeballs. “Other mediums don’t have that,” Chou said.
  • Engagement: The 80/20 rule applies to social media, Chou said: 20% of the people generate 80% of the sharable content. “The more granular you can get... the better understanding you have of what's going on,”
  • Advocacy: Social media lets brands get endorsements from everyday people, so brands should pay attention to posts that get retweeted. “If my friend posts something, it means more to me than if some random brand posts something,” he said. Retention: Every message needs to be measured for its retention value. Every new follower is an additional member of the audience for your next message. 
Pedro Gonçalves

Workday Social Media Buzz Is Mostly About Business - 0 views

  • Three out of four workers access social media on the job from their mobile devices at least once a day, and 60% access it multiple times, according to a survey of more than 1,100 employees in North America
  • But they’re not goofing off, the survey shows. Nearly half said connecting with co-workers was the top reason they used social media at work, followed by connecting with others on a fun social platform and connecting with customers.
  • Other leading reasons for using social media at work included having a platform for sharing work-related content and collaborating to drive new ideas and innovative thinking.
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  • customer support and product management reported infrequent use of social media to contact customers (3.1% and 2.9%, respectively).
  • Twitter is overwhelmingly the most popular social media site accessed at work for both personal and professional use at 70%, followed by Facebook at 65% and LinkedIn at 51%.
  • Corporate intranets and other internally built systems came in a distant fourth at 19%.
  • Businesses have recognized that resistance is futile. The survey found there was no difference between light and heavy use at companies with monitored, blocked or restricted sites.
  • “Employees will use social media during the workday,” said Flip Filipowski, CEO, SilkRoad Technology. “These findings make it clear: Companies can either find ways to use social media to achieve measureable business results, or they can ignore it at their own peril. There is a common misperception that people only use social media for personal reasons. This research proves that people are looking to social media to help them be better at their jobs — including connecting with co-workers and customers.”
Pedro Gonçalves

BIA/Kelsey Predicts Social Native Ad Market Will Double By 2016 | Adweek - 0 views

  • paid social media advertising will increase from $4.6 billion this year to $9.2 billion in 2016
  • "native" ads running on social media sites—contextual promotions that are baked into sites in a customized fashion—will total $1.53 billion this year while growing to $3.85 billion in 2016
  • During that time, BIA/Kelsey prognosticates, social display ads will grow slightly slower, lifting from $3 billion to $5.4 billion. It's the first time the 25-year-old company has broken out social native versus social display spend.
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  • Local social advertising will total $1.1 billion this year, BIA/Kelsey reports, compared to $3.47 billion in national spend. By 2016, the Chantilly, Va.-based firm predicts, local social will nearly triple, to $2.95 billion, while national will nearly double to $6.26 billion.
  • Meanwhile, per BIA/Kelsey, general local media spend will grow from $134.6 billion this year to $147.1 billion by 2016.
Pedro Gonçalves

France's Web Users Say 'Non' to Social Media Ads - eMarketer - 0 views

  • Unwelcome news for marketers in France who aim to appeal to people on social networks: A majority of those consumers find such ads unpleasant, useless and poorly targeted.
  • Sixty-eight percent of web users polled said they found advertising on social sites “intolerable, “ and 59% said it was pointless because it did not reflect their interests or buying habits.
  • Moreover, ads on these sites seemed to be less effective than most other kinds of online advertising. Only 19% of web users polled by IFOP and Generix said they had ever bought a product or service as a result of seeing an ad on social media, compared to 60% who had made a purchase prompted by an email.
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  • Three-quarters of respondents said they never bought anything on social sites. While 9% said they did so from time to time, just 1% said they made regular purchases on social networks.
  • only 16% of social network users sampled in June and July 2013 had become clients of a brand after connecting with it on a social network or seeing an ad on such a site—though 38% of web users active on social media said they took account of opinions or comments about brands before making a purchase.
  • The number of social network users in France this year will be 23.7 million, eMarketer estimates.
Pedro Gonçalves

To Monetize Social Media, Humanize It - Amy Jo Martin - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

  • Whoever invented the term "social media" didn't do the world a favor because, while that's the accepted term now, it's completely wrong, and I believe it's part of what drives this disconnect. Social media is not really media. I think of it as a channel, more like a telephone than a TV commercial. And when's the last time a CEO asked, "How are we monetizing the telephone?" And has a CEO ever threatened to not invest in phones because the company can't make money off of them?
  • Truth is, companies monetize the telephone quite well, and if you don't think so, take away your company's phones and see what happens to your top and bottom lines. Likewise, companies can monetize social media, but they have to stop thinking about it as a way to market products and start thinking about it as a way to communicate and build a brand.
  • Formal research typically takes months and requires healthy investment and long planning cycles. Smart companies are trading in highly rigorous research for quick, nearly scientific data collected through social media platforms.
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  • Social media is not a popularity contest. Followers don't equal influence. Don't make this a volume game.
  • Social marketing is a brand-building tool first and foremost. For decades, traditional advertising media have been let off the hook when it comes to measuring direct financial ROI. You should do the same with your organization's efforts in social media.
  • Traditional branding focuses on logos. Social media branding must be focused on people. Humanize your brand is the golden rule of social media, because humans connect with humans, not logos. Traditional marketing has always approached branding as a way to control the message.
  • Controlled messages are distrusted in a world where social media can expose them so quickly. Revealing the people behind your brand builds trust. Trust is the first step to building loyalty.
Pedro Gonçalves

Teens Getting Tired of Facebook Drama, Pew Survey Finds - 0 views

  • Though Facebook is still the most popular social network among teens, their enthusiasm for Mark Zuckerberg's network is decreasing, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center. Pew reports that 77% of online teens (ages 12-17) surveyed use Facebook. But while Pew's findings show that teens view Facebook participation as important for socializing, they have "waning enthusiasm for Facebook," as explained in the video above. The report cites teens' dislike for over-sharing and stressful "drama" on the social network. Teens also don't like the fact that more and more adults are joining Facebook, although Pew found that 7 in 10 teens are Facebook friends with their parents.
  • Pew found 24% of online teens use Twitter, an increase from 16% in 2011
  • Outside of Twitter and Facebook, teens don't have as much of an online presence. In 2012, 11% of teen social media users used Instagram, while Tumblr (5%), Google+ (3%) and Pinterest (1%) drew in even fewer teens.
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  • Despite Justin Timberlake's star power on Myspace, only 7% of surveyed teens use the network, according to the Pew report. And all 7% said they used other social media accounts more frequently than MySpace
  • Pew found that daily usage has not changed on social platforms in any significant way. "The frequency of teen social media usage may have reached a plateau," the report said.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Truth About Kids And Social Media | Fast Company | Business + Innovation - 0 views

  • kids are building a personal brand from an early age. Their digital footprint will have an impact on their future. Where they end up getting admitted to college, getting a job, and more. Social media will help connect them with like-minded individuals, including mentors, that share similar interests and aspirations that can help them achieve their long-term goals.
  • Facebook has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old to create an account. But according to Consumer Reports, last year 78% of parents helped create their children’s Facebook pages and 7.5 million users are under the age of 13 and lied about the age associated with the account.
  • After getting into a discussion with the third graders, we learned that several of them had abandoned their Facebook accounts because that’s where their parents were. They knew that the adult powers that be are a hop, skip, and a click away from monitoring the kid’s accounts on Facebook. The third-grade solution was to hop from Facebook to Instagram (which, ironically, Facebook also owns). In some cases, kids said they created new, rogue Facebook accounts where they connected with their friends and used their old ones as a decoy for parental supervision.
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  • The difference is Applicant A has a large social following of Twitter followers and Facebook friends which they’ve used proactively to connect with future professors, industry leaders, and executives at companies. They’ve already built a network of people who they are sharing valuable content with, allowing their strengths to shine. You are able to get a genuine understanding of the applicant by seeing how Applicant A engages with their followers and posts about the issues he/she is passionate about.
  • The scenario remains the same for job applicants. When choosing between two similar applicants, hiring managers are increasingly turning to social media outlets to supplement information they are unable to glean from applications or interviews. Many companies use social channels as screening tools.
  • Applicant B may have a social media presence (what college-age kid doesn’t?), but never took the time to fully develop it and turn it into an asset by having a “neutral” (read: a non-keg-stand) avatar photo, removing inappropriate language, and posting information that spotlights passions and strengths. As the college admissions recruiter, you can only choose one. Who would you choose? In this case, Applicant A’s wise use of social media gives him/her an edge over an otherwise perfect Applicant B.
  • Students with a robust social media presence and clearly defined personal brand stand to become only more influential.
  • Imagine a college admissions recruiter evaluating two applicants side by side. They both look the same on paper. They shine academically, with impressive transcripts, essays, and SAT scores. Both have an extensive list of extracurricular activities and outstanding recommendation letters.
  • 77% of employers use social media to recruit candidates
Pedro Gonçalves

The Dilemma of Social Media Reach « Radian6 - Social media monitoring tools, ... - 0 views

  • Altimeter Group recently studied the internal goals in corporate social strategy. The top priority stated by 48% of companies was “Creating ROI Measurements”. Hypatia Research showed management’s expectations of the return on social communities are rather low. Research by Chief Marketer shows that the number of likes, friends & followers are the most used metrics by 60% of U.S. B2C and B2B marketers.
  • There exists great controversy about the use of ‘reach’ metrics.
  • I noticed strong correlations between all of the metrics. This means that reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence.
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  • Many consider these to be vanity metrics: measures which are easy to understand but on their own explain little about the actionable effect.  They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. More actionable metrics are argued to be active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits
  • Talking about Twitter specifically, Adi Avnit de-emphasizes the importance of followers due to the fact some users follow back others simply because of etiquette. His ‘million follower fallacy’ entails that this etiquette is leveraged by some users to elevate their follower count. The theory is not without evidence. Cha et al. (2010) measured user influence in Twitter and found that retweets and mentions showed great overlap, while followers gained… not so much. However, Kwak et al. (2010) in contrast found followers and page rank to be similar, while ranking by retweets differed.
  • investigated to what extent consumers engaged on brand tweets based on 4 dimensions:  amplification (retweets), reach (followers), conversations (mentions) and attitude (sentiment).
  • Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).
  • following a great amount of people primarily affects a brand’s follower count. It doesn’t correlate with the other, more actionable, metrics. In fact, those brands perform worse on the other measures. Ergo, brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics
  • All interactions, whether it be likes, shares or wallposts, increase the EdgeRank which in turn exposes more fans to your content.
  • As the number of fans grew, so did the number of engaged fans (the interactions per mille stayed about the same). These two elements act as a positive spiral constantly growing the other.
  • I pose that the amount of fans, followers or friends is a relevant metric, considering it as the potential interaction userbase. Taking in consideration that your goal is to increase the number of engaged users.
  • Reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence. Brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics. Increase your user base – as your fans grow, so will the number of engaged fans
Pedro Gonçalves

Report: Teens love Instagram, but aren't abandoning Facebook - Tech News and Analysis - 0 views

  • According to GWI, mobile access to social media sites actually overtook traditional PC access in Q4 of 2013, as 66 percent of users accessed their social networks by mobile compared to 64 percent by computer. However, microblogging sites — which include Twitter and Tumblr — are apparently best reserved for the tablet, dominating over both traditional computers and mobile for usage.
  • No matter what the device, Facebook remains top dog across the board overall – account ownership, active usage and visit frequency, across all regions — although it has seen minor decline as other social networks gain mindshare. The key winner in this year’s new class of social networks is Instagram: A nearly 25% rise in active users betwen Q2 and Q4 of 2013 bring the estimated total of active users on the website to more than 90 million. It’s also popular for the kids, too, as teens represent the dominant demographic on the site, with a 39 percent share of active users. According to GWI, the only other social networks that can boast teens as their dominant users are Youtube and Tumblr.
  • GWI’s data only indicates that Facebook’s teens shrank two percentage points, leaving a rough user estimate of 34.19 million
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  • Overall, the main theme here is diversity. Users are accessing more social networks across more platforms than ever before, leading to a wider variety of social interactions happening daily. Perhaps the most telling piece of GWI’s data is that users, by and large, like to be social multitaskers — we are transitioning from commitment to just one platform to a diet of many different kinds of social media depending on our mood.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook's top 10 social design secrets | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • One of the most common mistakes made when designing social applications is focusing immediately on rich, heavyweight interactions rather than lightweight ones. All the best social experiences online map closely to how offline social experiences work: offline, people build relationships slowly, one lightweight interaction at a time.
  • Every now and again we have more heavyweight interactions, such as family dinners, big nights out with friends, birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations and so on. But if we hadn’t built the relationship through many lightweight interactions over time, we’d have no interest in the heavyweight ones. The aggregation of many lightweight interactions is very powerful. It builds deep relationships, and helps people curate parts of their identity.
  • It takes months and years to build relationships with people, and they all are built on many lightweight interactions over time. And people build relationships with brands in the same way as they build relationships with people: slowly, one interaction at a time. Just as we don’t suddenly become best friends with someone, we don’t suddenly fall in love with a brand – so build products that support lightweight ways for people to interact and show the aggregations of those interactions over time.
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  • Content that is positive, informative, surprising or interesting is shared more often than content that is not, and while content that’s prominently featured is shared more often than content that is not, this is a minor factor compared with how emotionally resonant the content is.
  • It is important that social experiences are emotional, and content that arouses emotion rather than reason is supported and encouraged throughout the experience. Resist the temptation to fill experiences with factual data about people, companies or brands, and focus on how people feel about these things.
  • You can debate things in conference rooms all day long. You can run iterative, qualitative research to reduce risk. But when it comes to social design, if it isn’t public, it doesn’t exist. Building beats talking; it’s better to launch fast and grow slowly than try launching an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.
  • The longer things stay in meeting rooms and internal prototypes, the more competitors with public-facing products are learning about what works.
  • Launch early, learn fast, and iterate.
  • Many designers and urban planners spend a huge amount of time detailing buildings and landscapes, setting down paths for how people will move. But they often get it wrong. People will cut across the expansive lawn, laying down a muddy path through the grass. People will force their way through hedges, in the process creating fresh pathways. Rather than detailing out every last interaction, it’s better to construct the basic frameworks and then watch how people move. Then you can iterate, because you already know where the paths should be.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook Still Reigns Supreme With Teens, But Social Media Interest Dwindling | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • 33 percent of the 5,200 teens surveyed choose Facebook as their most important social network. Following behind, Twitter has 30 percent of the vote, while 17 percent of teens say that Instagram is the most important social network.
  • What’s notable, however, is that interest in Facebook seems to be declining heavily among teens. Though teens still dub Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website. Over the past year, the number of teens who deem Facebook as the most important social media site has dropped from more than 30 percent to just over 20 percent. But it’s not just Facebook. Almost all social media sites have either seen a decline or stagnation in their importance to the teen demographic.
Pedro Gonçalves

Twitter Now Rivals Facebook as Teens' Most Important Social Network - 0 views

  • 30% of teens name Twitter as their most important social network, close behind the 33% who tab Facebook
  • The trends favor Twitter, though: compared to the last survey, conducted in the Fall of 2012, the proportion of teens naming Facebook as their most important has dropped 9% points, while those naming Twitter have grown by 3% points. Instagram is also gaining, up 5% points to 17% indicating it as their most important social network.
  • Google+ (down 1% point to 5%); Tumblr (up 1% point to 4%); and Pinterest (flat at 2% points)
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  • 93% of teens say they’re using social networks, down a percentage point from the previous survey.
  • According to data from Experian Hitwise, Facebook’s leading share of US visits to social networking sites and forums has dropped from 63.2% in March 2012 to 58.5% in March 2013.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Rise And Rise Of Influence | Fast Company - 0 views

  • A new survey by Initiative questioned some 8,000 web users age 16-54 in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, U.S., and U.K. to find out how they were influenced in purchase decisions by social media interactions. The results are kind of amazing: A huge 99% of the "top 10%" of influencers reported that their friends quiz them before making a big purchase. This top 10% has a disproportionate influence on the opinions of others--because 72% of them access content in print, online and mobile form more than once a day, compared to just 18% of the bottom 10% of influencers. 
  • A different study, by Market Force, underscored the fact that brands are leveraging social media to promote themselves. Embedded in the study were stats on the power of the average user to spread brand-related messages: 81% of U.S. respondents said posts from their friends directly impacted their decision on purchasing something, and 80% or respondents said they'd tried new things based on suggestions of friends.
  • This is a big departure from the static print ads and traditional TV spots of the past. Initiative's study even included advice for brands to move well beyond the thinking of a traditional 30-second ad spot, and push out additional material like behind-the-scenes footage...all to drive discussion and lead to more online chatter that will lead to brand discovery. It also suggests that brands build a team of "relevant social influencers" to spread new ad campaigns and stimulate dialog.
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  • Appinions, a company that analyzes data from five million sources to determine the influence of a brand, topic or person and promises to hook up companies with the most relevant influencers, earlier this month raised an extra $3 million in funding.
  • the "importance" of someone in a social network isn't simply how active or how many other people they're linked to--it's also a question of how well-connected and active each of these others are too.
  • Companies of all stripes are becoming aware of the power of high-value social media influencers, which is why they're signing up to campaigns like Klout's Perks. The idea is that via Klout, high-scoring individuals are "rewarded" with a physical gift or perhaps a discount voucher if they're influential in topics connected to the brand in question.
  • Klout is contentious to say the least, however, and its algorithm (not unlike Google's) is both mysterious and controversial--leading to debates like this extended thread on Google Plus.
Pedro Gonçalves

Social Media Denial Common for U.S. Businesses - 0 views

  • American businesses are in denial about the need to embrace social media. New research finds that 72% of businesses that use social media do not have a clear set of goals or a clear strategy for their social media platforms.
  • This lack of direction is happening despite the fact that 60% of Americans use some sort of social media, according to the Pew Research Center. Businesses, however, are not convinced that social media is anything more than a fad or a temporary phenomenon.
Pedro Gonçalves

Gartner Finds Corporate Websites Still A Higher Digital Marketing Priority For U.S. Mar... - 0 views

  • According to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, corporate websites are ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success” — beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising.
  • The survey, conducted in November and December of 2012, polled a relatively small sample of 250+ marketers from U.S.-based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue
  • Design, development and maintenance of the corporate website was cited by 45% of survey respondents as contributing to marketing success, with marketing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter cited by 43%. Digital/online advertising was also cited by 43%
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  • The survey asked respondents to rank different marketing activities first, second and third in importance, collating all three preferences to get the overall percentage. On first place preference, corporate websites came out joint top with online advertising, cited by 18% apiece as the most important activity. Social media slumped in importance on this measure — cited by just six per cent of respondents as the most important activity (and second only to the company blog):
  • The results indicate that corporate websites still have a key role to play when it comes to marketing a company’s offerings, despite the big role also played by social media. It’s also notable that mobile marketing is still relatively low down the priorities list, with an aggregated percentage of 24%. It’s still far better than the poor unloved (and doubtless rarely updated) company blog, though, with just 6%.
  • Corporate websites perhaps have a key reputational role to play in the marketing mix, supplementing and underpining social media marketing spending — by providing reassurance of a brand’s professionalism where a Facebook page can provide evidence of user engagement/approval (or otherwise).
  • The top priorities for increased budgets in 2013 are commerce experiences, social and mobile marketing, and content creation and management
Pedro Gonçalves

Where Did All The Search Traffic Go - 0 views

  • Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.
  • Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.
  • In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?
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  • user behavior is changing, and we are seeing a shift in the way readers discover their content.
  • We know that most of direct/dark social traffic is from mobile and apps. Could it be that social apps that aggregate content like Pulse or Flipboard are growing in importance?
  • When SEO was king, publishers sought to program their content to be discovered by Google. Now that content requires human muscle to be shared on social platforms, publishers need to expend a different kind of energy focused on creating content that's emotional, funny and discoverable — i.e. the stuff you might want to share. And this may be what's killing search traffic too.
Pedro Gonçalves

McAfee: Sneaky Teens Surf On PCs More Than Mobile, Facebook Rules Over All Other Social... - 0 views

  • Going mobile may be the mantra for a lot of tech companies these days, but if they’re in the business of targeting teenagers with their services, perhaps they should think twice: over 37 percent of teens use laptops, and a further 30 percent rely on desktop machines to surf online and engage with digital content, but only 13.5 percent use smartphones and only five percent use tablets, according to a new study out today from Intel-owned security specialists McAfee.
  • By far, the most popular social media site among teens is Facebook, with 89.5 percent of respondents using the site. Twitter comes in second with 48.7 percent and Google+ not actually that far behind at 41.5 percent. Tumblr (33 percent of all teens), it notes, is more popular with teen girls than boys; while 4chan (23%)  is showing the reverse trend: and McAfee notes that both sites are growing faster than other social networking sites.
  • Pinterest is being used nearly as much as Myspace (20%; 18%)
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  • possibly in keeping with smartphone use actually not being as popular as PCs — Foursquare and other check-in services are not so hot, with only 12.2 percent using these.
  • McAfee describes teen usage on social networks as “stalking” rather than sharing: half of teens responding said they mostly observed others rather than posted updates about themselves. Only six percent said they shared “almost everything.” Nevertheless, they are huge social network users: 60 percent check their accounts daily, and 41 percent said they check accounts “constantly.”
  • The study found that 79 percent of teens said they hid their online behavior from their parents: partly to keep private what they’re actually doing online, and partly because they’re online for a lot longer than parents think. Popular activities include accessing violent content (43%); sexual topics/porn (36%; 32%); and watching pirated movies (30.7%). A whole 15% are hacking other people’s accounts. Meanwhile, teens spend about five hours a day online; while parents only think their kids spend an average of three hours a day online. McAfee found that just over 10 percent spend more than 10 hours per day online.
  • Teens hiding what they do from parents has gone up massively since 2010, when only 45 percent said they hid their behavior, and is a disconnect when compared to what parents think: half of parents responding to the study said they knew what their teen kids did online.
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