As I’ve written over the years, in the era of the Social Web, we are all brand managers. While I spend a significant portion of my time sharing the importance of listening and observing to noteworthy conversations and the enveloping cultures that define relevant online communities. When it comes to participation and engagement however, identity is often an afterthought by most companies. Knowem is a new service that help businesses take a proactive step to securing their brand and product…
The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
As Twitter and Facebook compete for your attention and social status, there’s another story that serves as the undercurrent for something much more important, a fully pervasive and functional social operating system (OS) that serves as a open platform to connect you, your content, updates, and activity to your friends, peers, and followers across your social graph, regardless of network, browser, or device. Facebook and Twitter have effectively created immersible destinations and ecosystems that facilitate the development and deployment of…
The Race to 1,000,000 Followers Sends Twitter and Social Media into Relevance and Irrelevance
Source Updated… It started as a simple and seemingly harmless contest. Who would be the first person on Twitter to reach 1,000,000 followers? This wasn’t yet another follower push open to just anyone on Twitter however, not even the Weblebrities who helped propel the popular micro community to an emerging, iconic pop culture status; it was (and at the moment, still is) a race between the world’s most visible celebrities and prominent media brands. Ashton Kutcher, a television and movie…
The Domino’s Effect
Domino’s brand cultivated over 49 years…damaged in 30 minutes or less. The latest viral video on the Web today isn’t related to an upcoming summer blockbuster, nor the next Chocolate Rain sensation or even the next Obama Girl. Today’s social video frenzy is a real time case study of what happens when the employees of a franchise use online video to inadvertently cause a global domino effect that financially and emotionally impacts other franchises, employees, customers as well as bruising…
The Conversation Index
I admire the work of Valeria Maltoni. Over the years, we’ve shared our individual ideas and vision for discovering, monitoring, and measuring relevant conversations in order to effectively chart the corporate landscape and identify opportunities for mutually beneficial engagement and learning. We’ve decided to collaborate to weave our experiences and advice into one post that we hope helps you unravel the confusion stemming from value over hype when evaluating Social Media as a channel for presenting, interacting, and observing. As…
Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
On the heels of my recent post, “Is Social Media Recession Proof,” Forrester released new details associated with its latest research survey that links business buyers and their process of researching solutions to Social Media. Forrester interviewed business buyers to learn about their social activity, in this case, more than 1,200 technology buyers in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. with 100 employees or more in seven major industries. According to the responses, Social Media isn’t only limited…
A New Alternative to Twitter Search: Identifying Tweets, Trends and People Related to Your Keywords
Twazzup, a new search for Twitter, debuted recently and it just may replace you’re activity on search.twitter.com for the time being (thanks Louis Gray). As Twitter vies for its place as your online attention dashboard, keyword search and the ability to link those discussions to real people becomes the key to relevant engagement and intelligence. Timelines serve as our centralized activity hub and determine what we read, what we say, and who we respond to simply by the information that…
Is Social Media Marketing Recession Proof?
Source Fueled by a combination of popularity, curiosity, necessity, strategy, and trendiness, marketers are embracing a new recipe that injects a proactive, social approach to outbound communications and engagement – with or without all of the answers before they jump in. This approach, while courageous, has required faith, conviction, and champions who didn’t necessarily have access to metrics and case studies at the SMB and enterprise level. Many of the most and also least effective campaigns were implemented as a…
Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
Mark Zuckerberg Not to be outdone by the news of Twitter’s astronomical growth, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that the popular social network has hit a noteworthy milestone, the welcoming of their 200 millionth user. To celebrate the moment, Zuckerberg commented, “When we built Facebook in 2004, our goal was to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them. We thought that giving people better tools to communicate would help them better understand…
The End of the Innocence?
Source The Social Web is maturing at a blurring pace, packing thousands of years of behavioral and social evolution into the span of ten years or less. Social Media has amplified our individual voices and introduced an infrastructure that connects us contextually across a myriad of social networks. We’re conditioned to participate and engage genuinely and transparently in order to foster meaningful conversations and ultimately relationships. I’d like to explore the other side of the discussion that rarely sees the…
