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If Your Marketing Director Doesn’t Understand Twitter, Don't Tweet (Mediabistro)
What happens when you combine an intern-created Twitter account, a marketing director who doesn’t understand how to use it and 60 disgruntled employees, some with access to the account and nothing to lose? You get HMV’s Twitter stream last week. And this can happen to you. When budget cuts happen and heads must roll, one of the last things you want is to find your company’s financial drama under a social media spotlight:
So if your marketing director doesn’t know how to “shut down Twitter” or even how silly that statement is, then your company shouldn’t be tweeting. And maybe you’re firing the wrong person. Read >>
Who Is America’s Favorite NFL Team? (Deadspin)
According to Facebook, it's the Dallas Cowboys, even though they haven't won a Super Bowl in nearly two decades:
The exact numbers:
The Cowboys won a clear plurality. It's far from a majority, but based on the country's largest fanbase and widest distribution, the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to keep calling themselves "America's Team," at least in the NFL. Check out the article for more insight into other leagues. Read >>
Top Social Media Business Tactics (Real Business)
Here are examples of companies that made social media work in their favor:
- Hertz: Through the use of Facebook, Hertz started the Share It Up campaign. The more coupons you shared with friends on Facebook, the greater discounts you could earn. Almost half of consumers who saw the coupon shared it with friends.
- Mercedes-Benz: The company incorporated a unique promotion through the use of user interaction. The Choose Your Own Adventure idea allowed consumers to control the outcome of future advertisements. This made the viewers not only participate and spread the word, but wait eagerly for the ads to appear.
- FoodCycle: Possibly the best example of the power of social media is the charity FoodCycle, which aimed to publicize itself through Twitter. Using 140 character recipes under the name Tweet Pie, it collected an abundance of knowledge from its viewers in turn.
Are you not gaining the success you've wished to achieve with social? Curious what tactics other businesses have used? Check out the article for three more examples. Read >>
Social Media's Rocky Road In Business (ZDNet)
Despite all-time high levels of adoption in many organizations, the early results have at times been decidedly mixed. However, this has long been the case with emerging tech, whether the next big "revolution" was ERP, CRM, cloud, etc.
Those who track the online discourse on enterprise social media are surely aware that the trough of disillusionment is likely at hand. Yet the dreaded industry trough, brought about by the over-heated promises and inflated expectations bandied about from just about every quarter—including thought leaders, journalists, vendors, and yes, even end-users themselves— is considered a largely inevitable step in the process of maturity of any new technology. Read >>
Foursquare Now Includes Businesses' Twitter Handles (TNW)
Foursquare announced businesses can now add their Twitter account to their profile, pulling the two services even closer together. As a result, when customers check-in to a business with a Twitter account attached, if they choose to tweet about it, their message will feature the company’s Twitter handle. If you manage a single location on Foursquare and have already connected your Twitter account, you don’t have to do anything, as this change has already been applied for you. If you manage multiple locations, still need to connect your Twitter account, or want to turn this feature off, you can do so on the tools page. Read >>
Facebook's Lousy Ad Business Is Just The Start (Business Insider)
The journalists are at odds. Christopher Mims, among others, argue that Facebook will never make a significant profit. They argue that Facebook will always have slim margins and rely on sheer volume to generate a larger total sum. However, Simone Foxman thinks they are wrong. Facebook’s competitive strategy— to get more users in more places before working out how to make money from them— will give it a virtual monopoly over social media across the globe. That’s a far more important long-term benefit than immediate profits for shareholders. And once the company has this monopoly, it can and will capitalize on it. Read >>
Social Media Stock Tracker: Lukewarm Reaction to Facebook Results (Social Times)
The social media sector was flat this week as Facebook’s fourth quarter results failed to impress investors who expected dramatic gains in mobile revenue and Yahoo also failed to excite with its earnings and 2013 outlook. However, for the calendar year of 2013, the social media sector is still up 8 percent and this week we will see notable earnings from Zynga, Yelp and LinkedIn. Angie's List led in weekly performance with a gain of 8 percent, mainly from a new payments partnership with Square and an upgrade from analysts ahead of its earnings in two weeks. Read >>
How To Popularize Your Brands Using YouTube (Virtual Social Media)
There are literally millions of people who spend hours watching different YouTube videos. Aside from Facebook and Twitter, YouTube is also one of the most visited sites over the web. There are more than 900 million users visiting YouTube globally. If you use YouTube for proper marketing of your brand, you can come up big. Here's how:
- Make sure the viewers will be entertained
- Change the look of your channel
- Make sure that viewers will be educated
- Display your channel content using your modules
- Learn to socialize in the community
- User generated content may also be encourage
- Lead visitors to your website
Video marketing is one of the best ways to make money online and drive effective traffic to a website too. Read >>
How Insurance Companies Are Targeting You On Social Media (Unmetric via Social Media Today)
It must be hard to be a marketer in an insurance company. You are selling a necessary product that hardly gets the pulses racing. But all the insurance brands, which spend tens of millions on TV commercials, have taken to YouTube like a duck to water. Read >>
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