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What the F**K is Social Media. 1 Year Later.

Published September 1, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Mornings are an excellent time to read, write and share. Shortly after the morning coffee and toast I head over to my GReader and start browsing the feeds, in a pre-defined order.
Ahuvah Berger recently joined the Blonde 2.0 team, which means we get to enjoy her super writing skills at least once a week (hopefully more dear.. ;-). After her last week’s post on Engaging the Masses comes this post, continuing where she left off, and linking to a wonderful deck at slideshare by Marta Kagan, What the F**K is Social Media. One Year After. In a long (83p) yet light presentation Marta goes over the basics of SM, adding some cool pictures and stats to back her points and strengthening her bottomline (p 53):
SO PLEASE, STOP F**KING AROUND AND GET SERIOUS ABOUT HARNESSING THE POWER OF THIS THING.

Slide 44 onwards highlights some business insights that are relevant to any company, like ‘93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media’ and ‘85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence and actually interact with its customers’. Innovative approaches, I know..

The entire deck is hilarious (although the language might not appeal to everyone) and the 83 slides are going fast, but all convey an important message, and I only hope that a fraction of the 128,000 views this deck received were made by corporations and business executives and not just by us marketers – we’re already advocating this F**King thing too.. 😉
[RSS subcribers: Please read this post at my blog to view the embed deck]

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

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Being effective AND measuring your success

Published July 29, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Run into this survey at eMarketer.com in one of my Google Alerts the other day. With all the plethora of information sources, I find it more difficult to focus on topics and trends that interest me, as well as joining in on conversations, so it’s good to know GAlerts still has some benefits.. 😉

The survey in hand was conducted between some 1,800 social media marketers in the US, asking them about the effectiveness of their practices – meaning which tactics they used, how effective those tactics were and how accurately can they measure such tactics. The results are not that surprising, but I would like to focus on next steps – how can we make those practices more effective and measured more accurately.

The first issue we’re seeing is the negative correlation between a tactic’s effectiveness vs. our ability to measure it accurately (graph below). The 3 most effective tactics are User reviews or ratings (47%), Blogger or online journalist relations (46%) and Forums or discussion groups (42%). When looking at the ‘Very accurately measured’ column, those tactics are ranked 3rd, 4th and 5th, respectively. With the expansion of broadband and the coming of web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and thus consumers are more suspicious and don’t believe everything they read online. In the US the FTC are targeting bloggers’ freebies (PDF guidelines), and in the meantime there are some un-official guidelines on how to disclose and authenticate a sponsored conversation. In Israel on the other hand, things are moving slower (article in Hebrew).

The second issue pertains to hooking financial success with social marketing (graph below). It’s pretty obvious that social marketing is most effective for Brand reputation (39%), Brand awareness (37%) and Search engine results (38%). I’d like to point your attention to the Sales aspects of social marketing, Generate leads and Increase online sales. The marketers who were surveyed said that social marketing is not effective at Generating leads (35%) and Increasing online sales (46%). For social marketing to become bigger and better, we have to add revenues to the game, and being able to measure it. Dell are already showing the added value of their social activity on twitter, a new study finds correlation between social media and financial success and George Colony urges CEO to understand that social marketing is here to stay.

If we want social marketing to rock, Sales indicators must be inherent to any social campaign. It’s OK to start small, but start somewhere. Move the conversation from brand (only) to revenues as well. And one last request – be honest to your readers.

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StatusSearch – Get (more) reliable results

Published July 6, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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The Jewish mind keeps coming up with new inventions and ideas, luring CEOs to the holy land, even in the July sun – no wonder Israel has some 3,500 start-up companies, 2nd only to the US.

My friend Lior Levin joined forces with ROR dude Elad Meidar to form StatusSearch.net, which brings you results from your friends’ updates in twitter and facebook. The idea is improving reliability of course – if I’m searching for Michael Jackson, my friends will provide better results than the general population, or I wouldn’t have followed/friended them to begin with. LinkedIn and MySpace integrations are on the way as well.

The idea is simple, and is a semi-semantic way to filter results. While twitter search crawls the entire user base, statussearch.net looks at your friends only, assuming they know what they talk about.. 😉

Couple of things I noticed from a brief use that are worth mentioning/conversing:

  • True to the ‘real-time’ reality, the results are 1-paged, no option for ‘more’. You do get an icon to see the source of each result, but if your answer is 2-3 days old, you won’t see it. Also, it’s unclear to me how frequent the crawler works and if there’s any attempt to ‘even’ the results between twitter and facebook (think not). Does the engine displays ‘power users’ results first (because those users are more connected – thus what they say is more accurate/important/RTed/Liked)?
  • Size matters? I’m following some 650 people and sport 950 friends in facebook, which makes my pool of knowledge average I guess, at 1,600 minds. There is wisdom in there, don’t get me wrong, but how will a 500-mind pool looks like? or 5,000?
  • Memory loss. Sometimes I wish to see stuff I updated, and in that case I go to my own stream at twitter.com. Although I tried several times, no results from ‘me’ appeared in statussearch timeline, but that’s probably because I’m no longer friends with myself… 😉
  • Integration points. There are 2, email alerts and a firefox search plugin, both highly welcome. You can create unlimited number (free, for now) of alerts and receive an email once something happen (daily or immediately). The FF plugin (accessible from every page, right-hand side) is most useful – I’m a huge search plugin fan that makes the solution serve you, where/when/how you want, and not vise-versa.

Overall, I think Lior and Elad are on to something. The web is filled with junk data, and everyone, big to small, are trying to come up with solutions that will filter the gold out. StatusSearch is not a semantic search engine, but by tapping your friends’ knowledge instead of the general population, we’re one step closer towards finding that ONE result we want.

Twitter/Facebook gave me 1000% boost

Published July 4, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.

Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:

The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.

Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.

To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.

Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?

Exclusive tour at Channel 2 News

Published June 25, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Just got back from the first bloggers’ tour at a news company, as 15 of us visited the offices and broadcasting studios of Channel 2 News (web and web) in Neve Ilan. The tour was organized by Liran Dan, VP Interactive Services and Anat Ginio, who among other things is the ‘voice’ behind @channel2news – thanks guys! One fact I learned at the beginning is that according to Israeli Law, every news broadcast MUST be aired from Jerusalem and Channel 2 News got an approval to shoot at the Jerusalem area – Neve Ilan is midway between the capital and Tel Aviv. Weird law, but that’s for another discussion..

It’s always interesting to visit at a news network, being at the studio and all, but with the Iranian election in the background, and the change twitter is bringing into this medium as well, it’s even more interesting. The goal of the visit, at least for me, was to understand how social media, twitter in this case, can support the on-going efforts to bring the news, as they happen, to the viewers.

Channel2news joined twitter some 6 months ago, and in the past 2-3 months they are putting some 50-100 updates a day, mostly breaking stories, special reports, live coverage and Q&A. Their online strategy includes twitter of course, and they sport a youtube channel as well, but are always learning this medium, trying to figure out the best way to use it. Learning is also about listening and asking for feedback, which Liran was interested in getting. We suggested to open a second twitter account, for breaking news (much like CNN Breaking News), that would alert followers to new stories as they happen, and also raised the option of ‘pulling’ live conversation data from twitter (trending topics or twitterfall) to get the public’s reaction to the story. I’m guessing the adoption of the latter will not happen soon, but our first proposal might.

Still, there’s much to consider when mashing community conversations with journalism, and I for one think it’s wise that Liran is exploring this step-by-step. Only 4 weeks ago they first asked viewers to submit questions to the weekend show (Meet the Press), and even thou they could promote this initiative more, they’re going slowly, for now. Twitter (and other social services) are changing the way we consume (and produce) content, but once you started, it’s almost impossible to undo.

I do believe social services will change the way we view the news, and the recent events from the elections in Iran proves it, but the battle between traditional vs. new media will bring new challenges, that must be solved. Journalists have a tough job these days, as they see/read/hear stories as they happen, but cannot report them until they were authenticated, and thus losing the scoop. The next 12 months are going to be pivotal in the history of the social web and its effect on the way we consume the news, so stay around, we’ll be right back… 😉

Links:
Channel 2 News on twitter
Channel 2 News on mako.co.il and reshet.ynet.co.il
My photos from the tour, Kfir Pravda‘s photos and Yarin‘s photos (on facebook)

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.