A blog exploring The Social Web – Learn. Explore. Profit.
Mashable has a great infographic looking at the types of people who are scanning QR codes. You can read the infographic below in detail to learn more about who are scanning then, what devices people use to do it, and which brands are running QR code campaigns.
You can scan every QR code below to get more information too, how very cool
Avi Charkham has created a wonderful site called http://mypermissions.org/ which helps users to manage the ever growing list of apps, that we are associate our social accounts too. It is good to practice to prune services and apps that you no longer use for good security best practice. To make life easier, I’ve posted the direct links below:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications
Twitter: http://twitter.com/settings/connections
Google: https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens
Yahoo: https://api.login.yahoo.com/WSLogin/V1/unlink?.intl=us&.scrumb=oGuZry/Yg97
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?userAgree=&goback=.aas
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/account#applications
Instagram: https://instagr.am/oauth/manage_access
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/services/auth/list.gne?from=extend
Buddy Media’s Michael Lazerow delivered a fantastic talk at LeWeb11 on the latest trends for Facebook Pages, and Michael highlighted some of the best ways brands are currently using Facebook to engage with people and grow their business. The entire video is well worth watching and Michael’s deck from the talk is also available in this post. I have highlighted my own notes in bullet form which you can read below.
You can also see the panel discussion that followed Michael’s talk – Going beyond creating a Facebook page which is also well worth watching.
In 5-10 years, how will people get things done at work, at home, and on the go?
Watch Microsoft’s concept video to get a glimpse of the future of productivity. Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go. This video is a follow up to their excellent ‘vision’ video in 2009.
My good pal, Jon M Bishop recently presented at Digital Surrey last Thursday, on how mobile is changing our world. He delivered an engaging talk and described a number of excellent examples on how mobile phones are enabling mobile transactions in Africa. Here are some key statistics from Jon’s talk:
Jon, then went to discuss a real life case study of his friend Shame, who has shunned the Apple iPhone platform in favour of Blackberry devices. In particular, Share enjoys the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service with his friends to stay in contact and be informed. Jon also noted that the BBM service was also a key technology that helped to keep ah hoc gangs of youth to stay connected during the London riots.
Learn more about Jon’s talk by reading his slide deck above.
Every two to three years, a book comes along that makes a big difference to the way you think about your work and more importantly it helps you to become more productive. Marshall Sponder’s recent book, Social Media Analytics is this year’s must have book for social media practitioners.
The book gets right to the issues that social media managers face in their daily jobs and covers ideas and tools that can be used by businesses of all sizes. It helps marketers understand the kinds of data that should be collected and how it can help the business. Overall, a stunning read and a great reference book for all those who are asked to build, interpret and report on social media metrics. Social Media Analytics is divided up into twelve chapters and covers a wide range of complex issues such as social media ROI, though to the long term future trends of social analytics.
In the first chapter, Sponder sets the scene with a brief history of social media and delves into various arguments and discussion on the subject of social media ROI and provides a good overview of self-service analytics platform such as, Radian6, BrandWatch, Synthesis and Sysomos. The opening chapter also contains a number of real world case studies from Lithium and Vistaprint which really help bring the topic of metrics alive, and how other companies are dealing with the challenges of reporting on social media.
The second chapter explores how social media practitioners can target audiences using profiling tools, with a deep dive into viral video tracking. Also, in this chapter Sponder highlights a great case study around HTC’s mobile phone usage in Australia.
The third chapter examines monitoring and measuring social media Internationally through various languages, dialects, slang and linguistic variations with a special focus on China. This chapter also briefly looks at the Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange brand campaign. This chapter also features a case study from Synthesio, and provides the nuts, bolts, steps and methodologies, timelines, as well as problems encountered with social media monitoring and analytics.
The fourth chapter examines the issues of finding signal and separating out the noise in social media mentions. The chapter looks at “micro signals” and examines Google’s ITA acquisition. Finally, an interview with Chase McMichael, CTO of InfiniGraph is presented.
The fifth chapter looks at ways content creators value their tweets, posts, Facebook friends, Facebook fans, followers, and so on. Case studies from Buzzdetector (an Italian Social Media Monitoring platform) and the Associazione Canili Lazio, a nonprofit organisation for the fair treatment of dogs are also presented.
The sixth chapter explores how influence is measured in Social Media and platforms that offer influence modules, including Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, PeekYou, FollowerWonk, Klout, mPACT, TRAACKR, etc. Chris Brogan’s attempt to promote Stever Robbin’s book on 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More is examined using Sysomos.
The seventh looks at how to set up a scorecard for social media analytics, with contribution from Gary Angel of Semphonic.com. The chapter explores various agency scorecards such as the Razorfish Fluent, and the DFI scorecard . The gem in this chapter is the section which discusses questions to ask clients and stakeholders, which help to make the end results more meaningful and complete. A case study of Complex Media and InfiniGraph rounds off the chapter.
The eighth chapter examines scorecard creation and utilizes a Semphonic case study. Suggestions on how to segment data are discussed , maturity levels of clients, and several examples of advanced scorecards from Semphonic are presented in the remainder of the chapter, along with an interview with Gary Angel, CTO of Semphonic.
The ninth chapter discusses ways to track content that is created particularly for social media, and looks at ways to benefit from the intelligence gained from social analytics platforms. A case study from the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center is presented from Alterian. The chapter ends by looking at new measuring platforms such as Visual Revenue LLC, Adaptive Semantics (AOL Huffington Post) and InfiniGraph.
The tenth chapter looks at the differences between self-serve and off-the-shelf listening platforms. A case study with Brandwatch CEO Giles Palmer discusses how his platform was built from the ground up. Finally, this chapter also looks at the limitations of keyword queries and focuses on the limitations and scaling issues of self- serve systems.
The eleventh chapter explores how readers can “mash-up” data and presents an in-depth case study of Integrasco and Vodafone UK. Two additional case studies are presented from Econsultancy, LinkedIn and of Famecount.
The twelfth and final chapter of the book looks to the future of social media analytics, Sponder reviews case studies from Behive Systems, a Hong Kong consultancy who worked with QR codes, and an interview with Bob Pearson, CTO of WCG.
Social Media Analytics is the definitive text on the subject matter and is available from Amazon UK and I highly recommend it.
Flickr Credit: Twitter
Yesterday, Twitter announced that they had reached an epic milestone of 100 Million users as a press event. Along with the usual Press call, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo also shared some interesting facts.
Congratulations to the Twitter team, I can’t wait to see what the next year brings!
Sheryl Sandberg Facebook’s COO recently delivered a talk at the London School Economics on how Facebook is changing the world. In the remainder of this post, I highlight some of they key points from the talk which you can watch above.
Facebook has over 30 million users in the UK.
The most recent innovation of the web, is the shift from information retrieval to social discovery. This is the birth of the social web. When you browse Facebook, you are not necessarily looking for a subject matter – you are open to responses from others (Facebook’s newsfeed). We live our lives in social discovery and not in information seeking mode. The information web isn’t dying, it is just evolving.
Today, we are seeing two fundamental transformational shifts from the information web to the social web.
1. On the social web – you have real identity and real personalisation, its entirely personal
2. There’s a shift from information retrieval to social discovery (this is how Facebook works)
We live our lives mostly in social discovery, not really in information seeking mode. The social web is powering us as individuals in a totally different way. This is why we think people are spending so much time on Facebook. The average user in the UK spends about 7 hours per month on Facebook.
There’s another shift from the wisdom of crowds, where everything is done based on algorithms to the wisdom of friends, where we listen to recommendations of people we value. The social web doesn’t just connecting us to people we know, but it connects us to people we don’t know in ways that make them really human. This is a shift from the “what to the who”. Every single day 15 million people connect, and 50 million people ‘Like’ a page. Marketers have always known that the best form of advocacy is friend to friend.
2,100 firms participated in a recent survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, said they are either currently using social media channels or have a future social media deployment occurring. However, many still say social media is an experiment, as they try to understand how to best use the different channels, gauge their effectiveness, and integrate social media into their strategy.
Despite the vast potential social media brings, many firms seem focused on social media
activity primarily as a one-way broadcast channel, and have yet to engage, listen or analyse customer conversations and turn feedback into insights that impact the bottom line.
Clearly, most companies are still searching for the best practices and metrics so they can understand
where to invest and target their social media activities and build their own competitive
advantage.
Google’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, says “Too many companies have not evolved from what I call ‘shout marketing’ — think TV, newspapers, magazine ads — to influence by initiating and participating in conversations with consumers,” he said. “There needs to be a generational shift”.
The highlights of the report follow below:
Graphic: Business Insider
Although 79% of the 2,100 companies surveyed are either using or planning to use social media channels, only 12% of surveyed firms feel that they are using them effectively. These were the companies most likely to deploy multiple channels, use metrics, have a strategy for social media use, and integrate their social media into their overall marketing operations. The “smart firms” are using social more often to promote their brand, monitor trends among customers, and even research new product ideas. They don’t broadcast and spam, they engage!
Graphic: Business Insider
Two-thirds of surveyed firms have no formal social media strategy, and just 7% have social media into their overall marketing strategy. This is scary, and does show that some firms are still not serious about social. Even though 69% stated that their use of social media will grow, 61% admitted that they need to overcome a “learning curve” before adopting any kind of social media strategy. Sadly, 32% view it as a VP level priority – and nearly one in ten of the executives surveyed dismissed the business use of social media as a passing fad.
Graphic: Business Insider
Linking social media efforts to ROI, and understanding how it can bring competitive advantages still seem to be a challenge for many firms.
Graphic: Business Insider
Just 12% of the companies surveyed have hired dedicated employees to social media activities. Instead, social is mostly delegated to external agencies. “At the C-Suite level, they don’t want to talk about social media because they don’t understand it,” one executive admitted.
Graphic: Business Insider
Social is still seen as an experimentation.
As one executive put it, “Social media is a big ocean and we are pulling in a little bay where we are most protected.” The majority of these efforts (50%) are geared towards increasing awareness of the organisation or brand.
Graphic: Business Insider
The best firms understand that social is a conversation, not a broadcast monologue . Successful social media deployments examples include firms creating online customer groups and monitoring trends. They are twice as likely to use social media to poll their community and research new products.
Read Harvard’s complete report below.
Flickr Credit: Chrissy White
Are your customers satisfied, do they even care if your brand existed any more? With the infinite variety of goods and services, it is becoming harder to retain new and existing customers. One method of retention is through customer advocacy.
Harvard Business Review recently stated that customer advocacy strongly differs from satisfaction, or even loyalty. Advocacy can help a business to connect with its audience and build a relationship on trust. In turn, it can provide long term competitive advantage. So, how do you recognise your brand advocates? I find the term advocate rather boring. Therefore, I’m going to refer to advocates as super fans. Because, that is really what they are.
It is fairly straightforward to recognise your brand super fans, they are the ones that:
Support the brand. Super fans will stand by the brand even in times of difficulty, they aren’t afraid to react to criticism or correct factually incorrect statements about the brand, and will purchase brand products as gifts for friends and family.
Actively promotes the brand. Super fans share their experiences via various social media, openly praise company employees both internally and externally, and provide unsolicited feedback on service and quality. In some cases, they consider themselves “brand protectors.”
Are emotionally attached to the brand. They have a sense of ownership in the brand. They will forgive shortcomings (such as price) when buying products, and treat the brand as part of their inner circle.
But how does one go about turning customers into super fans? Harvard’s article recognises the following points:
The process of creating brand super fans depends on the level of customer engagement that already exists. For customers who are already engaged, you need to create emotional connections between them and your brand.
At AVG, we take our brand super fans very seriously. On our Facebook page, we actively recognise and reward those community members which are the most supportive of us. We actively encourage, our fans to upload videos and photos involving AVG (as a brand) and we also share product experiences with the rest of the community. Some of our Super Fans will even record product testimonials for us.
To conclude, 21st century firms are the ones that actively embrace their community and work with their super fans to genuinely build the brand, build trust, the customer base, and the balance sheet. Those who chose not to, risk extinction in our increasingly social world. Food for thought.