Social Media Training for Marketers

51 percent of consumers want to talk about companies without being listened to, 58 percent want companies to respond to their complaints shared on social media.

32 percent of consumers of all ages and 38 percent of Millennials (18-24-year-olds) have no idea companies are listening to what they say in social media.

43 percent of consumers think listening online intrudes on privacy, even though this is "social" media. Boomers put up the biggest fight (36 percent said they don't want brands listening to what they say about brands online), while only 17 percent of Millennials said the same).

Having Google Authorship allows the original author to claim dibs on original content; however, according to Mark Traphagen the acclaimed Google+ guru (he really is), there is nothing in place with Google + right now that protects any writer from content scraping.

it doesn’t prevent someone from copying your content, just wouldn’t allow them to outrank you for it. I suspect we will have to wait for implementation of Author Rank for that to be fully in effect,” said Mark in a Google+ thread with Neal, Frank Strong, and me.

Neal said in a recent G+ thread, ” I still recommend every blogger to at least include one internal link in each of their blog posts so that if their content does get copied, and it’s often copied as part of blogs automatically importing content through RSS feed manipulation, that at least you get a back link.“

The rule does NOT apply to standard images you upload to your page, but only images you promote in the newsfeed Thumbnail images for videos or links that you promote in the newsfeed as ads are subject to the 20% rule As of this week, announced in a tiny update on Facebook’s Developer Blog, the rule applies to application icons (which includes timeline tab images too) ***UPDATE***: Facebook reps have indicated that the text rule does NOT apply to the thumbnail icons, but they still recommend using images with little to no text.

Product shots (i.e. real life photos of a product) do not count against the rule. This means name tags, stop signs, text on the actual product, etc. – that’s all good to go and does not count towards your 20% text allotment “Tune-in” images for TV shows or movies have leeway as the title of the show/feature, the tune-in info, and the names of the actors and actresses involved do NOT count towards the 20%

According to The Social Times and VentureBeat article, Sephora’s Pinterest followers spend, on average, 15 times more on Sephora products than the company’s Facebook fans.

550 businesses with less than 100 employees in the U.S. and found that only 3 percent of their total advertising dollars flowed online, compared to as much as 16 percent for big companies.

most of these business do not have a professional marketing person whose job is to drive marketing," Rose said. "It's pretty hard for them to winnow their way through the 20 to 40 unsolicited requests they get a month to use digital marketing product A versus digital marketing product B."