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Archive for the ‘Social Media Marketing’ Category

Social Media Marketing Blog: Try Atomkeep & Shareaholic

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Is your life seriously getting busy tweeting this, Facebooking that, blogging here, linking there? Well, besides the fact that we want you to call us so that we can streamline and create efficiency, here are two tools that I really liked on first and second look.

Content sharing is important right? I mean isn't that what we all do when we say, "Please RT" or "Hey friend "xyz", may I share your link with my friends?" But content sharing is a whole another job in itself because lets face it, there IS a lot of content to share with everyone. I know how many times a day I pass on emails to friends just cause I got something that I thought was absolutely hilarious or worthwhile sharing with my close friends. On Facebook and Twitter, you can pretty much end up spending four hours just reading, responding, and retweeting or sharing stuff that people have shared/posted.

So if you are into content sharing, check out www.shareaholic.com – their tagline being "The Better Way to Share Across Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, and More". Basically, using this browser plugin, you can share links, videos, blogs, and images with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, and more. Best part, no need to sign up for yet another new service.

And who doesn't face challenges remembering which email address was used on which site or what username was created for one site versus another? I mean you'd think by now, EVERYONE would have jumped on the bandwagon of "username = valid email address". Right? Wrong!!!! But I digress.

So if you want to sync and merge profile data from various networks like Twitter, Facebook, et. all, use www.atomkeep.com. However, atomkeep.com appears to be facing growing pains as it doesn't seem to be accepting new accounts quite as readily. Didn't ANYONE teach them that a new idea is only as good as the execution of it? Sheesh!

But oh well, such is life in the fast lane on the super information highway. I'll be posting more tools that I've discovered or liked in the past few weeks of scouring the web so stay tuned…..

Tags:Atomkeep, Facebook_Digg, Shareoholic, Social Media Marketing, Twitter_Facebook
Posted in facebook, Linkedin, Social Media Marketing, twitter | No Comments »

Social Media Marketing Blog: Gartner 2010 and Beyond

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Gartner's "2010 and Beyond…" predictions for Information technology organizations and users has a whole section on Facebook. Sheesh, and I thought Twitter was the favorite new kid on the block but read along and see why Facebook dominated Gartner's report.

Key Findings

Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular social network community, with over 350 million active users as of November 2009. If Facebook continues growing as it has, more than one billion users will be on Facebook by 2011 and about 70% of users are from outside the USA.
- My two cents on "The Opportunity": Businesses seeking a global audience should focus on Facebook as their primary marketing strategy. Strategies to promote their products and services using culturally relevant messaging to that country's audience will give them a huge advantage of their competition.
65 million people access Facebook using their mobile devices. Mobile careers are working to provide facebook apps that will appeal to these mobile users.
- My two cents on "The Opportunity": Companies need to create mobile friendly websites. Inclusion of links to company websites won't do any good if mobile users cannot read the information displayed in their mobile devices. So 2010 strategy for businesses should be to create a mobile marketing strategy, first step of which is to make a mobile compatible website.

Some other interesting facts shared by Gartner analysis include:

Facebook may face potential competition from Orkut in India and Brazil, V Kontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan or QQ in China.
Me thinks that since the chance of the Chinese portal QQ becoming available internationally appears slim to none (given China's politics), Facebook should only be concerned with the other three. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know how many companies are actively selling anything in Russia so that leaves Orkut and Mixi as real potential customers. (More musings on these three sites sometime soon in 2010.)

Since Gartner devoted a whole section on just Facebook, I'll jump on that bandwagon and summarize this:

Facebook is important folks. Whether you want to communicate to your stakeholders and prospects or whether you want to launch a new product or create a customer service support strategy, do it through Facebook.

Don't just create a fan page. Your strategy shold include tasks such as joining various groups and forums, offering discounts and coupons, advertising specials & promotions and basically building your fan base using quality messaging that engages and converts fans into customers.

As always, don't just get started with a fan page because you can or want to do it yourself. Think of a long-term strategy and also think of measurement criteria to measure performance. Last but not the least, think about the resources required to make Facebook Marketing successful.

Here's to your Facebook success in 2010….

Tags:facebook, Gartner_2010_Predictions
Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Social Media Marketing Blog: What did we learn about Social Media Marketing in 2009?

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

2009 was a big big big year for Social Networking sites being leveraged for businesses. So I think that 2009 can be named the year that wasn't any good in any other except for the popularity of social media marketing.

We learned in 2009 that:

Gaining visibility through Tweeting and Facebook is actually fun. It’s also the most cost-effective way of enhancing brand image and keeping in touch with prospects and customers. You may find that most of your downstream constituents would be suitably impressed when you demonstrated you ability to post quality messages and build a good follower or fan base.

Social network messaging is far reaching and seems to carry more influence. People are happy to retweet, share, and generally recommend friends and followers to you. Social relationships go well beyond the one to one connections formed on networking sites. By sharing similar interests and experiences different unconnected users interact and form a community that results in local or traveling tweet-ups and or offline meetings that continue to grow beyond the online relationship.

Re-tweeting on twitter helps amplifying messages about your brand. In 2009 Harvard Business Research has found that 90% of tweets were done by 10% of twitter users! So if you want to be an influencer, re-tweeting messages will help you extend your reach to more users.

Research has also shown that social ads are particularly useful for increasing buying intent, on-line ad awareness, and favor-ability. All of these activities must now be measured and weighed along with traditional marketing metrics and must be on the marketer’s dashboard in 2010.

So 2009 was bad in pretty much every other way except for the the growing popularity of social networks. Small businesses extend reach and helped large businesses touch and feel their constituents or rather I should vice versa; the constituents were able to touch and feel big corporate types which would have been unheard of before Twitter and Facebook.

Let's see what 2010 has in store for all of us. Here's to more tweeting and more facebook fan promotion!

Tags:Facebooking, Retweet, Social_ads, Tweeting
Posted in facebook, Social Media Marketing, twitter | No Comments »