Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

On Monday, Google opened up Google+ and allowed companies and brands to create corporate pages. Previously, only individuals could create Google+ profiles (believe me, we tried to create a corporate page and were thwarted by Google!).

If you haven’t done it already, I encourage you to create a page for your organization, company, brand or initiative by going to the Google+ Create Page.

Even if you don’t know how or what you’re going to do on this new social media platform, I think you need to be on it because:

• Google+ has 40 million subscribers and that number is growing fast. It’s nothing compared to Facebook’s 800 million subscribers, sure, but 40 million is still a big number.
• Google+ users tend to be early adopters. According to Target Marketing, in the first few months of the network’s presence, the users were mostly young men, a third of users were between 25 and 34 years old and 59 percent of all visitors were male. This will surely change over time.
• Just as there isn’t one TV network or channel that dominates anymore, chances are your organization’s target audiences are on various social networks so you probably need a presence on all the major platforms.
• Google likes to drive traffic to its web properties, like YouTube and Blogger, so having a corporate presence on Google+ will be good for search engine optimization.
• Google likes to integrate its offerings, so there will surely be really neat tools to tie together Google+ with Google Analytics, Google search, AdWords, Google Reader, Gmail, etc. For example, there’s already a way to +1 an article in Google reader. +1 is Google’s version of the Facebook “like.” I’m especially excited about Ripples, which is an interactive graphic of the public shares of any public post on Google+ to show you how a post has rippled through the network and help you discover new and interesting people to follow.

My dilemma right now is that I don’t know how the Matrix Group Google+ page will be the same and different from our presence on Facebook. If you’ve ever heard me speak or if you follow this blog closely, you know that I preach a layered approach to social media where each platform has a different purpose and content strategy. There is overlap to be sure, but it’s best to have a different strategy for each platform to encourage your target audiences to follow you in multiple ways.

As your marketing team ponders this same question of market positioning for your Google+ page, be sure to create your page early to reserve the name and have a presence for the early users who will be looking for you.

Have you created your company’s Google+ page? How will you be using it to connect with your customers, prospects or members?

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• Tags: Facebook, Google, Google Plus, social networking

According to a study by ShareThis, the social sharing widget that you see on many websites, Facebook accounts for 38% of sharing traffic on the web. And that’s just the percent of people who click through. If you add links shared but not clicked, the number goes up to a whopping 56%. Which means that if we (the collective “we” since there are over 700 million of us now on Facebook) want to share a link with the world, we do it through Facebook.

This totally makes sense to me. When I find something new, cool, interesting, amazing or whatever, I immediately post it to Facebook and Twitter (increasingly, Google + as well, but more on that in a future blog post).  And I rely on my network of friends, co-workers, clients and business colleagues to find out about other new, cool, interesting and amazing things.

So I got to thinking. If social sharing is an important means by which we (again, the collective “we”) learn about new sites, we can’t and shouldn’t leave this sharing to chance. Sure, most websites now have a ShareThis widget, but is this enough? I say no. I think every organization needs a social sharing strategy that includes the following:

• What you want people to share. Do you want visitors to share your home page? Individual articles? Donation pages?
• How you want people to share. Do you want visitors to send an e-mail, post to their social networks, save to their social bookmarking pages, all of the above?
• Regular review of analytics to find out what and how people are sharing links on your site. Be sure to review your usage reports, ShareThis account and other reports to find out what’s popular, how people are sharing, and learn why certaini articles or posts generate activity.
• Design and CSS guidelines that make your site shareable. For example, if you share a link on Facebook, Facebook automatically indexes the images and allows you to cycle through the images and select one to include with the link. If your organization logo is set up as a background image in your CSS or the logo is not whole, your logo can’t be included in the link.
• Calls to action to encourage sharing. While many of us will share our favorite links on our own, other won’t unless prompted, so I think it’s important to have calls to action to encourage sharing. It’s also a good idea to test calls to action on a regular basis to find out which calls to action work best.

The design and front-end team at Matrix Group has developed a set of guidelines for setting up web pages so that titles are complete and the proper images are included in links. Be sure to test the shareability of your site on a regular basis and address issues with your web design or maintenance team.

How about you?  What’s your platform of choice for sharing links?

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• Tags: Facebook, marketing, social networking

Some of you know that I’m a prolific social bookmarker. I use a social bookmarking site called Delicious to store and organize my Web bookmarks. I don’t use the bookmarking function in my Web browser because I use too many devices every day: my Sony laptop when I’m at work, my Apple laptop when I’m at home, and my iPad and Palm Pre smartphone from everywhere. By using a social bookmarking site, I have access to all of my bookmarks from anywhere.

But what’s even cooler about social bookmarking is that my bookmarks are public (unless I mark specific links private, which I do when they’re links to sites related to my children or my friends), which means I can easily share my bookmarks with others. For example, I use the RSS feed from my Delicious account (www.delicious.com/jmpineda) to share my bookmarks on this blog (check the bottom, right column), and I encourage my staff to access my bookmarks when they’re looking for Internet statistics or case studies.

Finally, I love that I can create a taxonomy for my bookmarks. I’ve carefully created a list of categories that I’m interested in and whenever I bookmark a link, I associate that link with one or more categories. For example, I categorized an article on optimizing your Facebook page for search engines under the tags of Facebook and SEO. I have 148 tags and I bookmark sites nearly daily.

So I was very happy to learn that social bookmarking of choice, Delicious, which had been bought by Yahoo! several years ago and then put on the block recently, had been purchased by the founders of YouTube. You see, I started my social bookmarking life on a platform called Magnolia. I loved Magnolia and still think the user interface is better than that of Delicious, but January 2009, Magnolia suffered a huge data loss and I nearly lost all of my bookmarks. So I switched over to Delicious and I never looked back. If Delicious had gone under (which was a possibility if no buyer were found), I could have exported my bookmarks, but it’s always hard switching platforms and getting used to a new interface.

If you haven’t yet discovered social bookmarking, I encourage you to give it a try. Not only are my bookmarks easily accessible, I have found amazing resources by checking Delicious’ top links and exploring the bookmarks of other people. It’s fascinating when thousands of other people have bookmarked your same links and equally interesting when you’re the first person to save a bookmark.

How about you? Are you a social bookmarker? What’s your platform of choice?

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• Tags: social networking, taxonomy

It’s been forever since Facebook changed it stream to be divided between Top New and Most Recent and many folks are still scratching their heads wondering what’s what. Here’s why you want your updates to be in your friends’ and followers’ Top News streams.

According to Facebook, “Top News shows popular stories from your favorite friends and Pages, many of which have gained lots of attention since the last time you checked.” What this really means is that Top News shows the posts from the people and company page that you interact with the most. For example, I tend to “like” and comment on the updates from my friend Eileen, the photos from my brother Alex and articles from PBS. Since I interact with these Facebook account regularly, their posts are pretty much guaranteed to be in my Top News stream, which, by the way, is the default view.

Top News also displays updates by relevance, based on an algorithm. If a post is getting a lot of comments, it will probably show up at the top of your stream, even if the original post is not the most recent in your stream.

Most Recent “shows updates from as many as 250 friends and Facebook Pages.” This is a more traditional stream because it shows all posts, in chronological order, unless you’ve hidden posts from a specific person or company. If you haven’t checked out Most Recent recently, click on it now and you’ll see posts from a bunch of people and companies you thought weren’t posting. If you start interacting with some of these accounts more, you’ll start to see them in your Top News stream.

What does this mean for marketers?

It means that it’s absolutely not enough to have fans or followers. Your company’s Facebook page can have a million followers but unless they’re liking and commenting, your posts won’t show up in their Top News, which means they’re likely not getting much attention. On the flip side, once you get followers to interact with you more regularly, your posts will show up in Top News, which will further encourage them to like and comment.

Remember, the key to Facebook success is to get your followers to interact with you regularly. I’ll blog in the future about ways to encourage interactions. And oh yeah, I’m doing a webinar next Wednesday, May 18, 11am Eastern on Social Media Marketing and Customer Engagement. Hope you can join me.

BTW, you can edit your stream options by clicking on Edit Options at the bottom of your News streams.

What do you think of Top News vs. Most Recent? Which stream do you prefer?

• 3 Comments
• Tags: Facebook, social networking

I did it! I finally became a Mayor on Foursquare! Foursquare is a location-based social network that lets users “check in” to a place they’re visiting, tell friends where they are, and track the history of where they’ve been and who they’ve been there with. Typically, users check in from restaurants, clubs, bars, museums and other places of entertainment.  But I’ve also seen people check in from their local grocery store, a hospital, a gas station.

Foursquare crowns you Mayor of a location when you’ve checked in from that location more than anyone else. So I decided to make it a personal quest to become Mayor of Rustico, a restaurant in Alexandria that I enjoy and visit fairly regularly. So for the past couple of months, I scheduled all of my lunch meetings at Rustico, and even took my family there a couple of times. About ten days ago, I finally unseated the current Mayor to become Mayor. Woo hoo!

But here’s the rub: aside from getting a congratulations message from Foursquare and a crown in my profile, being Mayor gave me nothing. I told my waitress when I became Mayor and she looked at me like I was nuts. Ditto the manager. Where other venues offer Mayors something special, I didn’t even get a thank you for promoting the resturant to my Foursquare and Twitter followers for the past few months.  Many establishments, especially restaurants now offer “specials” to Mayors and people who check in xx number of times; it’s a great way to encourage people to come, to foster loyalty and spread the word about your company. When a friend called to invite my family to dinner at Rustico, he asked if being Mayor made it easier to get a reservation and I just snorted. Ha! I wish! Not even a free soda!

So I began to wonder if the folks at Rustico are even aware of Foursquare, Foursquare specials, and Mayors! I visited the Rustico website; no familiar links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. I did manage to find Rustico on Twitter, but the page is not customized, there’s not even a description! Their Facebook page has 3 fans and no status updates. Okay, so it’s looking like Rustico hasn’t yet developed a solid social networking plan.

I don’t believe every business should be on the Web and every social networking platform; it’s just not realistic, practical or even necessary. What I do believe, however, is that every business should have a listening strategy so that they can know if and when their business is being mentioned or discussed in a significant way on specific platforms. Does Rustico even know that hundreds of people are “checking in” to Rustico on Foursquare and Facebook places each week? Gosh, it takes just minutes to set up Google Alerts and Twitter searches.

Imagine this: you set-up a Google alert so you’re notified when your business is mentioned on the Web. You notice lots of mentions on a specific social network. You check it out, learn more, maybe invest in ads or specials. Foursquare, for example, has a primer for businesses on how to use Foursquare to encourage more business.

As for me, I recently lost the title of Mayor of Rustico but I’m not upset. I’m gunning for Mayor of another restaurant that I KNOW offers specials to its Mayors.

How about you? Are you on Foursquare? Have you managed to become Mayor? Did you get anything special for it?

• 2 Comments
• Tags: marketing, social networking

Last year, Matrix Group decided not to send out printed holiday cards.  Instead, we sent an e-card and donated the money we would have spent on printing and mailing and donated it to several local charities.  This year, we’re doing something similar, but with a social media twist.

We’re taking the money we’re saving by not mailing printed cards to our entire list and once again donating it to charity. This year, however, we’re trying to increase the amount that we give away.  For every new Facebook fan who “likes” our fan page (the deadline is December 14), we’re adding $10 to the charity pot.

Next, we’re asking our entire network of clients, partners, vendors and supporters to tell us how to give away the money.  I polled the staff and asked for recommendations for charities they thought were worthy of a gift.  We came up with the following organizations:

• Back On Your Feet
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Doorways for Women and Families
• Goodwill of Greater Washington
• John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents
• The Reading Connection
• The Washington Animal Rescue League
• WEAVE

In our Facebook page, we set up a Poll that allows fans to vote for their favorite charity from the list above. So far, we’ve gained over 100 new Facebook fans and nearly two hundred people have voted.

I like this year’s holiday campaign because we’re able to increase the amount of our donation this year, we gain new fans, and we are able to showcase effective and well managed charities in the DC area. It’s also been fun to promote this holiday campaign to our house e-mail list, on our social media pages, and to our network of friends and supporters.

Here’s how you can help:

• “Like” our Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/MatrixGroup
• Vote in our poll
• Spread the word about the campaign to your network of colleagues, friends and family

We’ve got a goal of $5,000.  Help us support some terrific charities this holiday season!

P.S. In case you’re wondering, we decided to still mail printed cards to our key client contacts because we were worried about some clients and partners not receiving the e-card because of a firewall or anti-spam software. In the end, we liked the idea of clients receiving something tangible from us and the ability to sign and personalize cards.  But instead of mailing nearly 1,000 cards, we’re mailing fewer than 200 cards.

• 5 Comments
• Tags: Facebook, Matrix Group, social networking

I was researching an organization last week and visited their website, blog and social media pages. The website was nicely designed, easy to navigate, and had good information.  The blog was terrific and I quickly subscribed to the RSS feed.  When I got to the organization’s social media pages, I was sorely disappointed.  Their Twitter and Facebook pages had nothing but headlines from the blog. Clearly, all they did was take the blog RSS feed and use it to populate their social media pages.

So did I decide to “follow” the organization on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  Absolutely not. Since I had already subscribed to the blog RSS feed, I didn’t feel compelled to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  Why add clutter to my social media streams with information I can already get elsewhere?

I know it’s tempting to set-up pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms and populate them with posts from your blog or press room.  We’re all busy and most communications and marketing departments are stretched thin.  But posting the same information across platforms isn’t doing your organization any good. Why?

• By posting headlines that meet the least common denominator across platforms (probably Twitter, with its 140 character limit), you miss out on functionality offered by the other platforms.  For example, Facebook lets you post longer updates, upload photos and videos, include links, host discussions, etc.
• You don’t give your target audiences a reason to follow or fan you across platforms.  Just imagine this.  If you post complementary but different content across platforms, your clients, prospects and supporters might just follow you on multiple platforms, giving your company an incredible voice with those individuals.
• If you’re posting headlines from your news room, you’re not offering people the authentic, personal voice we’ve come to expect on the social media pages.

Here’s what we do at Matrix Group:

• Our website showcases our products, services, clients, portfolio, news and webinars.
• This blog, which is authored by me, Joanna, the CEO, features my thoughts and commentary on social media, marketing, communications, strategy, customer service, trends and gadgets.  This blog DOES feature website launches at the bottom of each page.
• Our Twitter page showcases our work and clients, but the majority of the tweets are about industry news, trends, how-to articles, and case studies.  Twitter will tell you who we are and what we’re reading.  We’re pretty chatty on Twitter; we post updates multiple times a day.
• Our Facebook page also showcases our work and clients, but we also post photos and updates about happenings in the company, including trainings, parties, fun events, etc.  Facebook will tell you a lot about who we are as a company and our culture.  For example, our staff pumpkin carving contest was featured on our Facebook page.  We’re less chatty on Facebook, just updating a few times a week.
• Our Flickr page is home to our photo library of company events, while our Facebook page has the “best of” photos.
• Our YouTube channel is a work in progress and will soon feature short interviews with senior staff about their areas of expertise, including branding, the user experience, software development and security.

As you can see, our various pages are all designed to showcase our expertise, clients and work but the user experience on each platform has been carefully crafted to take advantage of that platform’s capabilities.  And while the website is clearly a marketing channel for the company, we’re not very sales-y on our social media pages, focusing instead on posting useful and interesting links.

How about you?  How are you creating an integrated use experience across your company’s social media pages?  What’s working for you?

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• Tags: Blog, Content Strategy, Facebook, marketing, social networking, Twitter

Every week, I check out the usage reports for the Matrix Group Web site and blog. I also look closely at the analytics reports from Facebook for our Facebook fan page.  In the last year, traffic on this blog has overtaken the traffic on the public Web site.  And as we increase the number of fans on our Facebook page, our interactions have grown steadily as well.

A recent article in Ad Age explores how some of the top consumer brands have Facebook pages with a fan base and interactions that far outstrip that of their official Web sites. Starbucks has 12.9M fans; Coke has nearly 11M fans; Oreo has 8.9M fans.  Of the companies in the article, only Starbucks has steadily increasing Web traffic.

All of this got me thinking:  What happens when an organization’s blog, Facebook, Twitter or other social media page gets more traffic than the official Web site? Is this the ultimate goal for marketers?  Is traffic on a social media site worth as much as traffic on a company Web site?  Does this increased traffic ultimately lead to more customers and sales?

I have clients who worry about redirecting traffic to social media pages, for fear of losing control over the conversations, not owning the Web property, or that the interactions are not quite official enough.  Others hold their social media stats in the highest regard.  Most of us  wonder what it really means when somebody chooses to “like” our fan pages.

How to make sense of all this?  Here are some thoughts:

• If your Facebook page is getting increased traffic and interactions, while traffic on your regular Web site is on the decline, ask yourself, “What is it about my Facebook page that’s working?  What’s making people “like” us, click through to articles and comment?  What are the lessons for content and opportunities for interaction on our official Web site?”
• Your goal should be to have your Web site, Facebook page, Twitter page, blog, e-mail campaigns, microsites, etc., all be part of an integrated strategy where each Web property is complementing the others and encouraging cross traffic.
• Ultimately, the goal should be conversions, whether that means more sales, more subscribers, more members or more donations.  Your goals should never be about traffic on specific platforms; that’s just a tactic.
• You need a way to track the effectiveness of followers, likes, clicks and fans across the different platforms.  Use tracking codes, cookies and marketing codes to determine which platforms are really helping your business to thrive.

Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Blog, Facebook, marketing, social networking, strategy

Guest blog post by Jill Foster

Since joining CitizenEffect’s Gulf fact-finding mission trip last month (also called the #CitizenGulf project), it’s been a non-stop learning curve on my end, plus tough emotional processing.

The social media factor and the #CitizenGulf fact-finding trip

CitizenEffect, a nonprofit that helps anyone online be a citizen philanthropist, formed the social media team seven weeks ago to personally visit the Gulf, meet with fishing families impacted by the oil spill, and figure out ways to help them. Local nonprofits in Louisiana met with us too, clarifying perspective and the needs of parishes there. We published content (audio, video, photo essays, written commentary) via CNN’s iReports, Twitter, Posterous, Live Earth’s blog, and more. It was difficult to see such hardship up close. But what helped get beyond the heavy emotional response was a decision made by CitizenEffect after the trip:

A CitizenGulf National Day of Action on August 25th (and you)

You, your friends, and communities can be involved. What’s the goal on 8/25th? To help create a more sustainable future for Gulf fishing families by investing in education. All funds raised on the National Day of Action (less processing fees) will go to the project’s charity partner, Catholic Charities of New Orleans, who will then administer an area children’s educational program.

What’s also exciting is how organizations – online and offline – are offering their support

Social Media Club chapters across the country are organizing meetups to occur on 08/25th — which you can attend (or you can certainly form your own meetup too). In the spirit of Louisiana and many Gulf communities, we suggest that meetups include great music (stereo or live!,) like blues, jazz, or Zydeco. Gulf Coast Benefit, which had fantastic success with a national Gulf awareness and fundraising campaign in early July, is a lead supporter of the CitizenGulf project as well. Enthusiastic partnerships both offline and online in the social space have been incredible. Read the rest of this entry

• 3 Comments
• Tags: social networking, Twitter

Last week, I had the pleasure of being a speaker at the Benefits Communications Conference of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Funds. During the closing session, one of the attendees asked me which social networks I thought were going to survive into the future. The dialogue went something like this:

Me (Joanna): I can’t predict the future, but I think Facebook and YouTube will stick around for a while.  Not sure about the smaller networks, especially those without solid revenue models.
Participant: But I’ve heard that the younger audiences are leaving Facebook now that their parents are signing up.
Me: Yes, I’ve read that as well, but Facebook has really tipped in terms of popularity, all the research shows that the older audiences don’t leave a social network once their friends have joined and they’ve made a commitment to the site, and Facebook as a platform for all kinds of third-party applications is really compelling.

But then I got to thinking.  Does it really matter if Facebook survives?  Does it really matter which of the social networks survives?

If you’re hesitating about investing in a social media strategy because you’re wondering which of the platforms will survive, I think you’re worried about the wrong issue.  Here’s why:

• Social media isn’t just a fad. Social networks have fundamentally changed how we communicate, connect and market.  Social networks have “tipped;” there is now a critical mass of people on social networks.  You can’t ignore the numbers.
• In the end, it doesn’t matter which social network survives because there are now so many mainstream and niche social networks, it’s almost pointless to worry about which ones will make it.  Remember when we thought no other search engine could threaten Yahoo!’s primacy?
• Your social media strategy probably needs to include having a presence on multiple networks, depending on where your target audiences are AND to ensure good coverage and reach for your marketing messages.

Here’s what I think IS important:
Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Facebook, social networking, trends, YouTube