Social Business Strategies

A new study conducted by The University of New Hampshire shows that spending time on Social Media sites does not affect the academic performance of students. Despite the ongoing concern of Facebook addiction, it doesn't appear to have a negative impact on school performance. These findings contradict previous studies which suggested the exact opposite.

More Content, More Searches Leaving aside such crisis communication tactics - for that is what it was to Southwest judging by Smith's defenders on Twitter - blogs are still an underutilized tool by companies, according to Social Media SEO. "Blogging about your business, products, and services is one of the most powerful marketing tools that you can control, and directly impact. Each new blog post equals a new page of content.

Online Video Watchers Prefer Google Sites Google Sites accounted for 13.2 billion videos, or almost 40% of total online videos viewed in December 2009, according to earlier comScore Video Metrix data. YouTube.com accounted for nearly 99% of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Hulu ranked second with more than 1 billion videos viewed, an all-time high for the property, representing 3% market share. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 561 million (1.7%), followed by Fox Interactive Media with 551 million (1.7%) and Yahoo! Sites with 539 million (1.6%).

The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers from companies of all sizes, responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial services; architecture, engineering and constructions services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

HubSpot's 2010 State of Inbound Marketing report, being released today, shows that Inbound-dominated organizations average 60% lower cost per lead than outbound-dominated organizations!

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Your strategic agency partners are key to your success. They bring with them domain expertise, years of experience deploying, and a fresh injection of thinking that most brands can't foster internally. As a result, relying on these agile partners outside of corporate walls if often key to responding to new technologies. Yet, as the technology landscape changes at an even faster pace than ever before, brands must have criteria in selecting the right agencies.

Great discussion on Google Buzz in the comments...

So what better way to understand social media than by looking at the fundamental principles of influence as taught by Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University? In his seminal book, Influence, Cialdini covers six "weapons of influence" that are hardwired into our social and cognitive minds. In other words, we can't help but behave in accordance with these laws of social interaction.

These are the first ripples in a wave of new technology that will make the Internet effectively site-less. By that I mean that the metaphor of the Web as we've known it for the last 15 years is breaking down. The Internet is increasingly not about sites but about content and people. As technology makes it possible for our online scribblings to appear wherever we may choose, the task of assessing influence will become considerably more complex.

Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

Links are the top metric by which search engines determine who you are and what you are about, and ultimately how you are ranked in search results. In other words, links are your website's life line.

Good stuff to know

* Google continues its prime directive. At the high level, this is a strong move for Google, they continue to aggregate other people's social content, and become the intermediatry. This helps them to suck in Twitter, Flickr, and any-other-data type as the APIs open up, giving them more to 'organize'. This is Google acting on it's mission to the world. * Privacy woes will scare consumers -yet adoption will continues upward. For consumers, the risk of privacy will continue to be at top of mind. Although the features allow for sharing only with friends or in public. expect more consumer groups to express concern. Overtime, this will become moot as the next generation of consumers continues to share in public. * Buzz could have faster adoption rate than Twitter. For consumers, this could potentially have more adoption than Twitter as Gmail has a large footprint Google told me it's tens of millions (active monthly unique). Of course, most Gmail users likely aren't Twitter users, but there could be a large platform to draw from. * Physical businesses lose more control over search strategy. For small busineses and retailers, this will impact their search engine results pages, as a single top 'buzzer' could cause their content to be very relevant, if that person was relevant, then their influential content could show at top of SERP pages. Expect Google to continue to offer advertising options now around buzz content -fueling their revenues. * A direct blow to Facebook, they must accelerate go to market. To Facebook, this is a direct threat, these features emulate Friendfeed and the recently designed Facebook newsfeed. Expect Google to incorporporate Facebook connect, commoditizing Facebook data as it gets sucked into Google and displayed on Google SERP. * Great for Twitter now -yet painful in the long term. This is good for Twitter in the short term, as it'll amplify tweets, and suck them into a new system and give additional

#1: Listen with Private Lists #2: Craft Your Brand With Public Lists

But, a new study by Edelman (whose digital arm features social media and ebusiness genius David Armano) claims that bond is eroding. A survey of 4,875 adults (500 U.S.) world-wide shows that just 25% of respondents said their friends and peers are credible sources of information about companies - a decline of 20% since a similar analysis in 2008.

Yesterday Google announced a new social media service called Google Buzz. This new service combines a number of different social media tools into one: (a) friends, commenting and rich media (photos, videos) like Facebook, plus (b) simple, public status updates like Twitter, and (c) location based updates like FourSquare. Google Buzz also adds two more new and interesting things: (a) curated recommendations of what updates are likely to be most interesting to you, and (b) easy access to the social network through a tool 175 million people use... Gmail. If you want to know more about how Google Buzz works, read the official Google Blog article announcing it. This article is about the marketing implications of Google Buzz.

Forrester Research is one of the organizations that engages in such outreach-and, candidly, it's one of the few organizations whose content actually is of enough interest for me to share it with my community. When Forrester issues a report that deals with social media and communications, Forrester graciously offers me a copy of the report. These reports sell for hundreds of dollars or more, and as an independent consultant, I couldn't possibly justify the cost of purchasing one. Because Forrester shares its intellectual property with me at no cost, I'm able to opine on the research and share the findings I believe are most significant.

But, a new study by Edelman (whose digital arm features social media and ebusiness genius David Armano) claims that bond is eroding. A survey of 4,875 adults (500 U.S.) world-wide shows that just 25% of respondents said their friends and peers are credible sources of information about companies - a decline of 20% since a similar analysis in 2008.

We all need to be able to adjust and adapt as situations for clients and consumers change