“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.
This Week: Using Social to Make Smarter Business Decisions, People Share Happy, Check Your Social User Perceptions and DMPs are Growing Up.
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.
This Week: The Post-Social World, Marketing with Consumers, Social Data for Business Decisions, Foursquare’s Uncertain Future and The Courage to Change.
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.
Living Our Digital Lives – Digiday shares the trend that we’re now in an age in which there are no boundaries between our real lives and our digital lives. Everything is tied together, and this is only going to get more true.
Key Takeaway: The data marketers can leverage to better reach their customers comes from more than just their customers themselves. Social signals, information created from a user’s social connections, also play a heavy role. We can now consume socially-curated “newspapers” and get recommendations based on the behavior of our friends. Marketers would do well in identifying the intersection of their customers’ digital and real lives. How are your customers’ social connections impacting the content they consume?
How HBO Goes Social – FastCoCreate shares an interview with HBO’s head of social media marketing, Sabrina Caluori in which she shares HBO’s perspective on social media.
Key Takeaway: The article first and foremost communicates that social media is not a campaign. It’s a commitment that may have some campaign elements, but at the end of the day, it’s an always-on brand commitment.
It’s also important to remember that it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by what is measurable in social media and what truly matters. You need to approach metrics just like tactics—choose what matters most.
Doing Isn’t Enough – A recent study from Recommend.ly found that Walmart’s 3,500-plus local Facebook Pages aren’t performing as well as their local competitors’ Facebook Pages. Overall, the Walmart Pages are unresponsive to fan comments, do little to generate conversations, do not participate in posts and do not spark responses from fans.
Key Takeaway: Walmart’s initiative was ambitious, which is commendable, but creating a Facebook presence is a commitment to building a community. Walmart put a stake in the ground and didn’t put a plan in place or provide the proper framework to turn it into something valuable. The Pages are there for the sake of being there.
“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.
“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.
Going Local With Social – Clara Shih of AdAge writes about how brands can make their social efforts succeed at the local level: aligning internally, claiming social-local pages and empowering employees at the ground level.
Key Takeaway: Success in any social effort, whether it’s local or something else, requires the fundamentals. Shih’s article lays out three key steps that any brand should do for any effort. You have to have internal alignment, your social properties accounted for and employees able to deliver on the promise you communicate through social channels.
Consumers Rely on Reviews – eMarketer shared the results of a study showing that consumers trust brands that offer reviews more than brands that do not. In fact, “84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources.”
Key Takeaway: A brand’s word isn’t enough anymore, and making reviews hard to find means consumers will probably just look elsewhere for what they need versus making a purchase without question. Brands are being shaped by what others have to say as much as they are shaping themselves, which means embracing consumer reviews will make a brand stand out from the crowd and build trust with existing and potential customers.
The Power of Social Data – A new algorithm has come out that’s able to use Twitter to predict whether or not you’ll get sick in the next eight days with 90% accuracy. The algorithm comes from researchers at the University of Rochester after analyzing 4.4 million tweets with GPS information over the course of one month.
Key Takeaway: The amount of data we’re generating is staggering. If we can do this with the flu, imagine if we could use social data to predict when someone will run out of a product, allowing us to proactively reach out to them. That’s just one example of the power of social data and why listening and analyzing is essential.
Twitter’s Bold New Path – We’ve discussed Twitter’s recent lockdowns on its API on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn regularly on the Brave Ad World podcast. AllThingsD breaks down some of Twitter’s latest moves, the reasons why and the path ahead.
Key Takeway: Nothing in this space can be taken for granted. Brands that invest too much in one platform will find themselves scrambling when and if that platform changes as some Twitter app developers are right now. It’s important to be both wide and deep when it comes to social media investment.
It’s difficult to say with absolute certainty what Twitter’s future holds. It’s burned some bridges with developers but at the benefit of becoming a more attractive advertising platform. However, users have been accustomed to their third-party apps. If Twitter cuts them off, there may be some backlash.