@Publish

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.

Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).

With more than 3 billion videos viewed every day, YouTube still only accounts for about 44% of videos viewed globally, according to comScore. Other video upload sites such as Vimeo, news outlets and other websites account for the rest.

brands are increasing their use of the social network for marketing and consumer engagement. As reported by CMSWire, a recent Simply Measured report shows that 64 percent of the Interbrand Top 100 now have an active Google+ Brand page (up 3 percent from December 2011), 22 percent of the brands now have circler counts more than 100,000, up from 13 percent, and more brands are posting more frequently: 43 percent are posting more than three times a week (up from 15 percent in February).

Among the top brands, the study showed that engagement on outbound posts is growing. Circle engagement is up 112 percent since February and content engagement is also on the rise as it increased 65 percent since February. 

During this preview period, organizations that use Google Apps will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013

As much as 40% of clicks on mobile ads are so-called worthless clicks, offering no return on investment for the advertiser, according to a new study.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

Facebook has done some initial experiments and found that the Recommendations Bar was getting three times more clicks than the posts in the Recommendations Box, according to a blog post from Facebook developer Jeffrey Spehar.

using both the Recommendations Box and the Recommendations Bar may be overkill.

If you are using the Recommendation Bar, you may not want to rely on that alone to allow people to like your post, since it doesn’t show up when someone is logged in as their page.

"Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words," says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. "When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest."

This trend toward the visual is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.

A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it's the pictures they took that are enjoyed the most. Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media

As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.

Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial

98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels

To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

Having a thousand quality fans that do something is better than having a million followers that do nothing.

Instead of spending all your efforts on selling your product, develop and foster relationships with your community by providing relevant and useful content available to them at their point of need. Understand what your customers want and give it to them.

The Attention Economy paradigm was, in many ways, the fundamental building block for understanding the rise of social media and social networking. This paradigm rested on a simple, but amazingly robust, observation – that the scarce resource in our information overload world was attention.

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

attention is no longer the scarce resource in the world of the mobile Internet - it's location

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.

Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them

Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.

Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.

“PR is about pitching the brand to the media.  You help shape the story, but you don’t craft the story.  Brand journalism is about creating the actual content, finding the best ways to share it, and telling the stories of your people, customers, and brand.” You’re skipping the middleman, essentially. You’re no longer hoping for a third party to tell your brand’s story, you’re doing it yourself.

“Brand journalism is the use of a journalistic approach to storytelling on behalf of a brand.  It is the mindset of assembling and delivering a compelling story, but it is not impartial.  It presents the brand’s messages and perspectives.”

A brand that is creating and sharing terrific stories and entertaining content, however, will get noticed and those sales leads will come as you establish yourself as not only a source of information regarding your particular industry but a place to regularly stop by for good reading material in general.

thousands of so-called virtual assistants - essentially freelance social marketers - who typically offer clients 1,000 likes for about $25. 

"One thing all of these virtual assistants have in common is a large number of fake profiles that they use,” he said. “The average virtual assistant I've seen who does Facebook marketing has at least five Facebook accounts.”

Such deals have proven irresistible to marketers. “Business owners jump on the chance" to get hundreds of likes, said Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director for Minneapolis-based Wixon Jewelers, "but they don't realize the repercussions of doing this. Facebook has already cracked down on this by changing its Newsfeed rankings based on engagement." Companies' strong engagement with their fans will appear more often in their fans' feeds, he adds.

52 percent of boomers will like brands in exchange for offers, compared with 42 percent of millennials. Both groups had trouble remembering all of the brands they had liked — 63 percent of millennials and 60 percent of boomers. Like doesn’t necessarily lead to love, as just 16 percent of millennials and 36 percent of boomers said they truly “liked” brands they have liked on the social network. The opinions of friends remain important, as 68 percent of millennials and 52 percent of boomers said they turn to information about brands from friends.

While there’s no disputing the fact that Facebook provides a valuable channel for brands to engage with their fans, the value of a like is diluted if the people liking them won’t remember who they are tomorrow. That’s why it’s vital for marketers to understand the driving factors behind online behaviors so that they can convert fans into loyal, interested, and paying customers.

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy

After watching two sales snatched from the jaws of well-known (and more expensive) national brands, the consultant couldn’t resist asking the clerk what this smaller company’s secret was. Was there a special sales incentive? Did the store have too many of these shoes in inventory? But the clerk just pointed to the crowds of shoppers needing attention and then explained, under his breath, that this particular brand saves him a lot of time on busy Saturdays, because they ship their shoes to the store with the laces already laced up.

what every marketer should worry about most, what should keep you up at night, is whether you have done all you can to minimize the obstacles your customers encounter during the buying process