Social Media Training for Marketers

doom and gloom hasn’t made it to Madison Avenue, where Twitter is more valuable than ever. The biggest reason is that unlike Wall Street and Silicon Valley, advertisers and agencies don’t expect Twitter to be Facebook. In fact, they’re thrilled it isn’t.

This is where one of the big Silicon Valley-Madison Avenue divides comes into play. In the Valley, everything is about scale. Big numbers are everything. But advertisers have plenty of scale options. What they’re looking for is different tools that help it solve specific problems for clients. Twitter, even with its small reach compared to Facebook, can do things Facebook cannot.

“Twitter has a more intellectually engaged audience,” Huge’s vp of user experience Jessica L’Esperance said. “It’s niche, which is why it’s powerful.”

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

If one Page tags a second Page you like or follow, you may see that post in your News Feed even if you don’t like or follow the first Page.

LinkedIn’s Publisher Platform is the user-facing component to what has become a robust media arm at LinkedIn, largely propelled by its acquisition of news-reading app Pulse, and its content often feeds into daily news aggregator LinkedIn Today.  The platform, which allows users to connect and share content with others, is part of LinkedIn’s strategy to grow the frequency with which users interact on the website. The staged roll-out will provide access for roughly 25,000 users on LinkedIn, with the goal of a global roll-out within a few months.

Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises.

potting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts

Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.

The question was fielded among consumers who have accessed a social networking website, asking them how likely they would be to make any type of purchase on such a site in the following 12 months. Overall, 18% of respondents said they would be very likely (9%) or likely (9%) to do so. Interestingly, only 15% were neutral on the subject, with a solid majority unlikely (12%) or very unlikely (55%) to do so.

While women appear to be the more active gender on social media, it’s men who are more interested in shopping on the platforms, according to the Javelin survey results. In fact, 23% of male respondents reported being at least likely to make a purchase directly through a social network this year, compared to 14% of female respondents.