Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Posted on December 24, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds – infographic

Posted on December 22, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: Budgeting for social media: Who pays for it and why?

About Guest Author:

Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology, health and parenting. Beside this she is fond of eating. Recently an article on Nokia Lumia 800 attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Racing Games For Kids.

Have you ever come across deals like discount on purchase for a copy of a tweet or for liking a Facebook profile of a company? What could happen if you like Dell’s Facebook profile to Dell in reality? What is there for Coke to encourage Facebook profile? These are at the end of the day only intangible and binary signals confined within servers and networks. And answer is web 2.0 or interactive capabilities of today’s World Wide Web. User generated content is becoming tools for marketing in both B2C and B2B segments.

But who and why should spend?
All most anybody willing to draw public attention can spend – Barrack Obama did it in presidential election and Ford do it for their cars. Social media allows companies, organizations to spread brand awareness and increase customer engagement.
Companies spend millions of dollars on market research activities every year. But social network sites and forums provide endless opportunity to interact with customers and to understand their psyche at fractional cost. Besides, you can earn commitment if engage the customer around the branding activity. Reviews and remarks generated by customers work as marketing content for other left out prospects and customers.

Budgeting
But even a deep pocket corporate also needs to budget its spending. And despite so many cost efficient benefits it’s not easy to budget social media optimization. Part reason is lack of effective parameters that link money spent to money earned directly and the other part is slow action of optimization initiatives.
Other than budgeting, another common problem with SMO is how to distribute the allocated fund. Too much stress on campaign eats up fund for customer engagement process. This results in less than expected return on investments.
For these reasons, often companies drag their feet when budgeting for social media marketing. Even most willing marketing officers often suffer from over-budgeting or under-budgeting. To avoid such problem you can try few useful tips to streamline your social media initiative.

Separate budgeting
Make separate budget for different activities like, campaign, customer engagement, customer care etc. And don’t let one activity to eat up fund allocated for other activities.

Activity planning
We all know social media is a very fast changing medium. But for proper budgeting and fund use you must have a plan for future optimization strategy for near future. This would help you to allocate fund properly.

Introspection first
What worked for Ford may not yield for you. Try to understand your customers, prospects and brand reach. Every brand has its niche and it is important to understand that before you plan your strategy.

No magic
Social networking sites don’t give you any magic wand. It is absolutely legitimate if you find social media not much promising for you. You can restrict yourself within digital marketing only.

Wise parameters
Be wise when deciding on what test parameters to use to check effectiveness of your media effort. Try to rely less on paid media and stress more on earned media. Millions of followers won’t earn you dollar if they don’t shell out money to buy your product. Try to build and nurture even a small base of engaged followers.

CMOs must understand time is the most valuable input to skim optimum benefit from the social media marketing. And how much time you can afford would be major determinant of your budget. How much to spend is not important in SMO; what is most important is how long you can afford to spend. So, be careful to spend evenly across a long time horizon for better brand engagement and sales conversions.

Posted on December 14, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: A Driving Force in Mobile Technology

Social media has already been firmly established as the new paradigm of electronic communications, and in 2012 it is expected to become even more prevalent thanks to the rapid development of mobile applications which will allow us to constantly receive update in real-time, wherever we may be. Online social networking is moving towards an “always-on” model; an efficient way to be tied-in to the people and organization that matter most in our lives.

Smarpthones are the new de rigueur electronic platforms for receiving social media updates. Twitter, the leading short messaging and micro-blogging social network, is constantly being redesigned to improve user experience on mobile devices such as an Android phone or Apple's iPhone. Other popular online social media platforms like Facebook and Google+ are also experimenting with different new features for their mobile apps that take full advantage of the improved functionality of smart handheld devices.

Both Apple and Google are engaged in a veritable arms race for mobile operating software (OS) dominance. Apple's iOS 5 and Google's Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich Android recent upgrades were focused to accommodate the advanced multitasking capabilities of smartphones and tablet computers. Both mobile OS platforms are centered on the idea of social media being keenly integrated in users' lives. The ability to receive and create social media updates is taking center stage in the new mobile OS offerings and their third-party apps. Thanks to the vastly improved hardware features in video, audio and connectivity, users of the next-generation mobile devices are poised to become the most prolific group in terms of contributing social media content.

Internet and software giant Microsoft is also actively engaged in transforming its ubiquitous Windows OS into a premium platform for providing a rich social media experience. The upcoming Nokia Lumia lineup of Windows-powered smartphones promises to be a solid contender in mobile social networking. Microsoft's social media strategy is not limited to its partnership with Nokia. The company's next iteration of its flagship OS, Windows 8, is being developed with a strong social media and cross-platform functionality in mind.

Disclosure: Sponsored post

Posted on December 8, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: What does Google+ Need to Fix?

Guest Post Author:

Paul works in the marketing department for CliqStudios, a cabinet manufacturer that sells white kitchen cabinets and more factory-direct, and is a blogger and Apple fanatic.

We all know of Google’s dubbed “Facebook killer” called Google+ that has, in fact, failed to kill Facebook. We also know that the success of Google+ is also highly debated. Sure, it sports over 40 million users, but only a fraction of those users actually remain active. In contrast, as of last September, Facebook has over 800 million active users worldwide.
So, what went wrong for Google+?

From the outset of its beta, the primary selling point of the service was its almost too simple way of organizing your friends into Circles so you can share specifically and privately with only certain people. Circles was meant to be a means of one-upping Facebook’s lackluster and underused Lists feature.

However, Circles is by no means perfect, and the way it’s intended to be used is somewhat laborious. Using Circles is a manual process and requires you to drag and drop your friends in a variety of friend categories that you’ve created.

The problem is that friendships aren’t one or the other, and are constantly changing. Google+ can’t keep up with your life outside of your interactions on Google+, and thus requires you to continually evaluate your friendships and manually change them on the service.
If you think about it, most people wouldn’t bother spending the time to organize their friends into super specific categories, let alone keeping the Circles organized and up to date. This, basically, then renders Circles useless.

Shortly after Google+’s release, Facebook announced Smart Lists, a feature capable of automatically grouping some of your friends. For example, it creates Smart Lists for people you are related to, places you work, and for where you are currently living.
What’s more, and what is the most important part of Smart Lists in terms of updating relationship and organizing friends on a social network, is its ability to dynamically update. If a work friend leaves for a new job, he is automatically removed from that List once he updates his employment. Facebook is showing that developing better ways to categorize your friends without you having to think about it is important for its users.

Therefore, rather than Google+ requiring its users to manually update their Circles, Google should start to give Circles some artificial intelligence capable of evaluating and updating for you. While there’s not a way that I’m aware of for Google to know every detail of your life, there must be a way to analyze your behavior and interactions across the site to do this. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll leave it to the developers to figure out.

What do you think about Google+’s Circles? Do you use them? Do you constantly update them? Please share your opinion.

Posted on December 5, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest post: How Google+’s Integration Of Blogger Attempts To Legitimize The Web

Guest post author:

Francis Santos is a writer and blogger for Benchmark Email and can be found on Twitter.

A few months ago, internet users suddenly found a big black bar across their browser windows whenever they accessed Google’s services. Standing out in stark contrast to the gargantuan corporation’s usual light colored palette, this bar became “Google Control Central.” This was the first step in a comprehensive effort to harmonize all of Google’s far-flung serviceswhich range from search and translation to email and social networking.

Blogger users should now identify themselves
This harmonization recently extended to the untold millions of users on Google’s über-popular Blogger site. A pop-up field on the Blogger In Draft Dashboard holds out the promise of accessing future Google+ social media features. However, the blog writer has to switch out their current Blogger site profile with a Google+ one. From then on, any social connections would have their blogs appear in Google search results along with an annotation that the writer shared it.

With this announcement came a footnote that this new integration facility would not be available to any writer who is currently using a pseudonym. This policy provoked considerable oppositionfrom a wide range of users, not just on the Blogger site but also on Google+ itself.

Google+ is integrating with Blogger but not all users are thrilled.

Many hesitate to use their real names
Google seemed to forget that their users are located all over the world, including the 42 nations Freedom House claims have repressive governments. Therefore it could be understood that Cuban, Iranian, or Tibetian citizens wishing to even mildly criticize their leaders might be hesitant in linking their real name to their comments.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything states that that “we are Google’s product, not its customers”. That was clearly evident when Google+ first launched and the admins went into “seek and destroy” mode. They erased thousands of profiles because they suspected that the name on the profile was not the user’s “legal name.”

Bloggers have received death threats
For many of the users of the Blogger service the real name policy also presented a clear obstacle. Bloggers don’t have to be in Third World countries to receive credible death threats, as some in North America and Europe have. There are a number of reasons why an online writer might want to remain anonymous in perpetuity. They might have been blogging for years under a pseudonym and could confuse their readers when they found that their habitual read of TheCreepingGecko’s blogs were now being written by Mr. Bartholomew Featherstonehaugh. Or perhaps they had made some deprecatory remarks about clients or co-workers that they did not want to be personally identified with.

Google changed its policy to allow nicknames
The real name debacle is a primary reason why Google users everywhere welcomed the official announcement that the policy had suddenly changed. Google will soon allow users to maintain their anonymity and chosen public identity on Google+ and Blogger. However this is not the only worry Google users have, as participating in the services offered by the web juggernaut can lead to some very unpleasant results.

Google shuts down all access to violating users
An underage user in the Netherlands signed up for a Google+ account. As soon as the Googleplex discovered that the boy was three years younger than the minimum allowed, they not only just deleted his new social network account but all of his Google services. In a single action, Google shut down his access to email, documents, maps, and everything else they supply.

Of course Google has the right to enforce its policies, which include prohibitions against “copyright infringement” and “publishing of someone’s private or personal information”. The worrisome question is whether any Google adult user could see years of their personal emails and precious work documents vanish because they violated the terms in any way. Perhaps they did something as innocent as posting a photo they copied from a copyrighted site, or mentioning in a post that “BTW, if you need Steve’s cell number, it’s…”

Impossible to change your primary email address
Google+ users also found a troublesome, albeit less critical quirk in their new accounts. Whatever email account they used to sign up for the service remains the primary one… with no way to change it. Alternate additional addresses can be added but the primary remains immutable for all eternity. You might have signed up for Google+ with your work email and changed jobs; got married and are no longer using your maiden name; or used one of your websites’ domain names which you’ve now closed down. If so, your “no longer applicable” primary email account will continue to be associated with all your Google services. And there’s nothing you can do about that as it’s against Google’s terms to open another account.

Google’s global search market share is 85%.
The original name for Google was BackRub.
W3 Markup Validation shows that Google’s home page has 37 errors and 3 warnings.
The Googleville Data Center uses up as much electricity as all of Tacoma, Washington.
The current market capitalization of Google is more than 12 times greater than the CBS TV network.
Google Co-Founders’ Larry Page & Sergey Brin have a net worth of $16.7 billion each.
$16.7 billion can buy you 68,940 2011 Ferrari 458 Spiders, or 282,840 houses in Kansas.
Excite CEO George Bell was offered Google for $750,000 in 1999. He turned it down.

Publicly identifying yourself can be a boon
To be fair, there are many advantages to write on Blogger under your own real name, as Google continues to be the online leader that Microsoft could have been if their internet policy hadn’t run off the rails when we were still using 2400 baud modems. Blogger is a major platform which can allow the savvy writer both an effective platform and a wide-reaching pulpit. It is far easier to identify with Mr. Featherstonehaugh than to TheCreepingGecko. Google is essentially correct in stating that the change could boost blog readership and help readers gain a greater insight into the personality and viewpoint of the writer.

Google certified as a U.S. government identity agency

Google has recently had their user credential policies certified so that they meet U.S. federal privacy and security requirements. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace now includes Google as an accredited identity agency, which makes its services suitable for a number of federal applications.

The slow death of the anonymous web
The move to the use of real identities on the Wild Wild Web is meeting with begrudging approval by most of its users. However, many are recognizing that a network directly responsible for pumping trillions of dollars a year into the world economy needs to grow out of its “sophomoric prankster” stage and into the light of greater legitimacy and verifiability.Google is leading the way to this future of near-universal identifiability where the internet will be less anonymous and by extension, perhaps tamer.

What is your opinion on the legitimization of the web? Please join the debate by entering your comments in the box below.