“
Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.
This Week: The Siloed Web Is Inevitable, Customer Service as a POD, Looking Back at 2012 and Who Are You Trying to Impress Anyways?
Read More“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.
Four Rules for Social Business – Andrea Cook of Social Media Explorer shares insights from the Explore conference on social business, a concept that brings a lot of confusion and a lot of opportunity. Cook provides four rules for becoming a social business.
Key Takeaway: The rules laid out in the article are solid, and they boil down to the idea of keeping things simple. Make sure communication is tight, focus on what really matters, connect with consumers based on what they care about and if it sounds too good to be true (like a score to rule them all), it probably is.
Influence Algorithms: Formulas with Assumptions – In this article, shared with me by Matthew Dooley, Tom Webster of BrandSavant breaks down the biggest challenge associated with influence algorithms like Klout: assigning value to individuals. This makes scores more descriptive of the level of activity than of an actual behavior or ability to influence a behavior.
Key Takeaway: There is no silver bullet for measuring influence. At best, the tools that exist are directional. They give marketers an idea of someone’s influence, so they can look into this person more to understand whether or not this person is truly influential. Yes, a little bit of work is still necessary.
Can Social Lead to Impulse Purchases? – AllThingsD shares a post from Jim Stoneham of Payvment outlining the range of mechanisms on social networks that reflect user action. The post shares findings on user behavior in regards to broadcasting purchase intent—something people tend to avoid.
Key Takeaway: The lowest hanging fruit for marketers is leveraging lightweight actions like ‘Like,’ which can be used to lead users down to more definitive actions like purchasing or broadcasting an intent to purchase.
A Deeper Kind of Influence – Christopher Penn analyzes some recent trends in influence, including YouTube’s emphasis on ‘time viewed’ in video rankings. He considers where we are going when it comes to influence and moving beyond rebroadcasting to conversions and actions taken.
Key Takeaway: Marketers are asking for more, and the tools are getting smarter. We’re entering a time of measuring actions taken and level of engagement. This means moving beyond reach analytics to deeper measures of influence. I’m ready.
“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.
Too Much Sharing? – On Friday, August 24 a tragic shooting took place at the Empire State Building, and the web blew up with onlookers tweeting and posting graphic photos via Instagram of the incident. Steve Huff of BetaBeat shares his thoughts on Instagram living in two worlds: the always positive, pleasant world view and the real-time, hard-hitting news world.
Key Takeaway: The pictures shared are shocking, and it’s difficult to say whether or not they should be shared online. On one side, it’s valuable to be able to share on-the-ground real-world events, but it’s also an issue when this content is mixed in with photos of weekends with friends and happy memories. It’s jarring. We’re still growing up as a society that’s constantly-connected, and boundaries will be set over time, not quickly. In fact, it’s the ability to share both types of content that’s made the social web so powerful.
The Value of Social Data – SmartBlog shares the results of a poll that found that 40% of respondents do not expect data derived from social networks to influence business decisions in the next year. Jeremy Victor of SmartBlog shares his perspective that this is a massive oversight.
Key Takeaway: Choosing to ignore social data is a “head in the sand” kind of attitude. Social data unlocks a lot of potential for brands in the form of product innovation, customer sentiment and competitor activity. Social media data doesn’t replace other data sources. It adds to them, making all sources work harder together.
What Is Engagement? – Digiday gets the perspective of five business leaders on how they view engagement.
Key Takeaway: Engagement is an easy term to throw around. It sounds good. It ties back to the lofty views we have of social media. And it allows you to avoid more difficult specifics, but at the end of the day, engagement is a consumer interacting with a brand on some level. It’s a consumer taking action. In some environments that action is a ‘Like.’ In others, it’s a view. How you define engagement should tie back to what your KPIs are. Every marketer should know how they define engagement in each of their marketing efforts just like they define success.
Wait… Social Media IS Productive – Harvard Business Review shares the results of a recent McKinsey study on the impact of social technologies that found that social media can actually increase productivity of workers.
Key Takeaway: Social media is often touted as a great way to connect with customers, but it can’t be overlooked internally for communication and collaboration.
The Data Lifecycle – No one crunches data quite like Chris Penn, and this article provides a great high-level overview of a four-step data cycle.
Key Takeaway: You can’t take numbers at face value. Social media has a variety of metrics across multiple platforms. The real insight is found when you actually analyze the data and turn it into a course of action to optimize your content, your campaign your strategic roadmap or even something outside of your social media plan like product development.