PBNJ Marketing Blog

In an article by Christopher Heine, with ClickZ, written on March 29, 2010, Facebook seems to be in the process of changing their ‘Become a Fan’ button to the  word ‘Like’. You can read the entire article below. This is going to be a tremendous change among how you can market your brand on Facebook and how many followers will perceive it.  If I am a Fan of something, I want to follow it and keep informed of any updates.  A sports Fan follows their teams every move and game.  If I like something, that does not necessarily mean, to me, that I am want to keep up constantly abreast of it.  I simply just like it.

But, in the bigger picture, I will tend to like more things than I would become a fan of and, hence, my profile will tend to show a more deeper side of me.  I then become part of a more specific demographic and more specific targeting trends.  Hmmm… interesting!

Read on and let me know what you think.

Facebook is scaling back on the word “Fan” and ramping up usage of “Like” on brand pages. According to a confidential e-mail sent to ad agencies today, the social media site will change the “Become A Fan” button to read “Like” within the next few weeks.

When asked about the change, Annie Ta, spokesperson for the Palo Alto, CA-based company, confirmed via e-mail that the words on the button would be changed. But she wasn’t able to offer other specifics about whether “Like” would replace “Fan” in other places on Facebook. “We’re still working on some of the details, but brand Pages can still be referred to as ‘Fan’ Pages after the change,” Ta replied.

Facebook, in the note to ad agencies, said it wanted to give the agencies advance notice about the change that could affect upcoming advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy.

Part of the confidential e-mail read: “Over time, as users adapt to the language change, we recommend that you invite people to connect to your Page by saying ‘Find us on Facebook’ or ‘Like us on Facebook’. You may also choose to put more emphasis on your custom URL than you used to.”

The e-mail also explained how the new “Like” button will be differentiated from the “Like” feature already seen in user updates.

How it may affect ads was also addressed in the e-mail to ad agencies. “Users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences. An Engagement ad unit, capable of making connections, will feature the ‘Like’ button and show social context above it such as, ‘John Doe and 3 of your friends like [Page Name].’ Standard ad units, not capable of making connections, will simply feature the word ‘Like’ by itself, and may show social context above it that says ‘John Doe and 3 of your friends like this ad.’”

Facebook users have been clicking the current “Like” feature nearly twice as often as the “Become A Fan” button, according to the memo. And the social site appears convinced using “Like” more often will increase engagement between consumers and brands.

The e-mail read: “‘Like’ offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in. These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages. We believe this will result in brands gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term ‘Like’. The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible.”

Scott Kleper, CTO for the San Francisco-based social marketing firm Context Optional, suggested that the change could indeed create greater engagement as Facebook intends. “Becoming a fan of a brand is perceived as a large commitment and is an important measurement metric… ‘Liking’ can be another great driver of awareness and an opportunity for users to show an additional form of affinity,” he said.

Scores of brands, such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Skittles, have cultivated online communities on Facebook.

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I will admit that I am a fan of Google Reader. I have my keywords added and every morning I have several articles to peruse. Several articles have been publicized on how to use social marketing or social media to brand your product to increase sales, on what to avoid doing, on what you should be doing, and several on “We are the best at it” so we can help you do all of these things. Every one has their recipe and, is one better than other, could be. I believe that for each opportunity comes a different recipe. A little bit more here and a little bit more there. A higher temp to cook faster or you may only want a simmer. I know these analogies are terrible but I think it’s true.

Today I came across this article that deals with the 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media by Taddy Hall from Advertisers Age. He points out some interesting facts if you are trying to sell your product utilizing Social Media and he even states that this is not an exact science.

Here are the steps for you to read:

1. The 1% Rule
In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage — and better recognize and reward — these super-influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule
When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are to to four times more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage them not only to convert but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media/New Pipes Rule
In today’s socially driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer to consumer through word-of-mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in social media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule
Throw your own party; don’t just cater someone else’s! If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control — such as Facebook or YouTube — you may get great “attendance,” but data show it’s hard to convert and retain these party-goers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule
Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers,” but what makes them truly valuable is the number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in “Linked,” you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “weak links” matter in the “real world,” and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule
Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content. Ninety percent of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them — making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans. Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influentials’ followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule
Our research consistently demonstrates that e-mail and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old e-mail marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via e-mail and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your e-mail, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse Before the Cart Rule
Success in social media happens when brands infuse their content with social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably), not when they simply stick their ads and content in social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in social media, your brands and content need to have social attributes — content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your social strategy relies on advertising in social media, it’s probably better to hang on to your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule
Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message into the social world, but our data show that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact. Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic. In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer-Service Rule
Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media-planing processes that begin with reach and frequency targets are largely unhelpful in social media. Reach and frequency — as well as engagement, preference and conversion — are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

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Spending to quadruple as B2B marketers warm to new channels

by Bethan Jones

NEWS

Mobile and social channels will be the fastest growing areas of business-to-business marketing spend, analysts have predicted.

The cash splashed on B2B mobile marketing in the US is set to quadruple over five years – rising from $26m in 2009 to $106m in 2014, according to a report from analyst Forrester.

The rise and rise of the smartphone in the enterprise means marketers are waking up to the mobile channel as a valuable tool for getting their message across, the report said.

Spending on social media marketing in the US is also set to boom, reaching $54m in 2014 – up from $11m this year.

According to the report, businesses must interact with their customers in order to get the most from their social media spend.

“Explore the use of cost-effective social marketing tactics like blogs and Twitter that allow you to connect and converse with your customers, and use display advertising to build excitement around your products and direct customers to these more immersive experiences,” the report said.

Forrester raises a caution flag, however, against businesses diving into social media without a firm strategy in place. The report suggests setting up a social media hub that spans all areas of the business: “We recommend creating a cross-functional social media committee or centre of excellence to develop social media strategy, process and guidelines,” it said.

Marketing spend across all interactive marketing channels – including paid search, display media, SEO, mobile and social – is expected to double from 2009’s figure of $2.3bn, climbing to nearly $4.8bn in 2014, the report added.

Increased spending on digital marketing has been stimulated by the need for marketers to avoid expensive offline campaigns and adopt channels where ROI can be more readily proved, Forrester said.

My comment:

Thank you Bethan for this information.  It is hard to believe that I so much money is going to be available out in the market.  The days of newspaper ads and yellow page deals are pretty much counting their days to extinction.  If your marketing proposal doesn’t come with an application that works on Iphone, has an ad on Facebook, an immediate tweet on Twitter, or any one of the several social marketing techniques, it may go without saying that you have a very good chance of not getting the contract.

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In The Economic Times yesterday, an article was presented with excerpts from Marketing Guru Philip Kotler from an interview that was done with ET.  Below are some of the excerpts from this article.

It is interesting to read what this expert, who is credited from coining the phrase ’social marketing’, is saying about where the marketing market is today and where companies/institutions need to be aware of when it comes to social marketing.   He believes that ‘one requires a radical change in mindset & approach in such an age of turbulence.’  He states that he is working on a new framework called ‘holistic marketing’ which will go beyond the already well known framework named the ‘four P’s’ (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion).

These are only some of the excerpts but if you would like to read more, please click here to view the entire article.

You have said that the average company is using only about 10 per cent of the Internet’s potential. Which ‘eavenues’ are particularly under-used?

Companies should be increasingly turning to the new media, not to replace the old media, but to find blends of the new and the old that work well together. Tools that should be considered include webinars, blogs, podcasts, and most importantly, mining the social networks, where so much dialogue takes place about products and services (both favourable or unfavourable). We haven’t yet figured out how to use these new avenues and vehicles profitably; we’re still in the experimentation phase. Most companies are still using traditional media for the bulk of their promotions, but they should also be carrying out experiments to determine where they can mine some ‘gold’ in the new media.

You are credited with creating the concept of ‘social marketing’, which seeks to discourage unhealthy behaviour amongst consumers. Are you pleased with the results so far?

Very pleased, but social marketing involves much more than efforts to discourage unhealthy behaviour. The purpose is really to encourage positive behaviour and the maintenance of such behaviour, and to show people that while they are free to make their own choices, some choices are very counterproductive to their lifestyles and goals. Social marketing ideas have been widely applied to well-known causes like ‘say no to drugs’, ‘exercise more faithfully’ and ‘eat healthier’, but they can also be applied to broader social causes.

You have said that turbulence often leads to all the wrong responses from management. Like what?

One wrong move is to do nothing — to continue with the way you’ve been doing things. A second wrong response would be to panic, which often leads people to behave so conservatively that they forget that, as a wise person once said, ‘a crisis is something that shouldn’t be wasted’. Crises produce all sorts of new opportunities.

The third wrong response is to just cut budgets across the board by some fixed percentage. Let’s say a service-focused company cuts its service budget by 20 per cent. This basically removes the key factor that led people to prefer this company over others in the first place. So if there must be cuts — and often there will be some slashes in both budgets and in hiring — this must be done with great selectivity and care.

MAJOR SHIFTS IN THE MARKETING MINDSET

FROM marketers thinking about customers to everyone in the company thinking about customers.

FROM selling to everyone to trying to be the best at serving well-defined target markets.

FROM organising by products to organising by customer segments.

FROM emphasising tangible assets to emphasising intangible marketing assets such as brands, customer equity, channel loyalty and intellectual property.

FROM building brands through advertising to building brands through integrated marketing communications and performance that satisfies.

FROM making everything inside the company to buying more goods and services from outside.

FROM making profit on every sale to building long-term customer value.

FROM aiming for more market share to aiming for more share of each customer’s wallet.

FROM being local to being ‘glocal’ — both global and local.

FROM focusing on shareholder benefit to focusing on stakeholder benefit.

Until now, many business leaders have operated with a ‘playbook’ based on two underlying market conditions: a bull market and a bear market. Is this approach suitable for the Age of Turbulence?

These two playbooks will always be of some use, depending on whether the business cycle is going up or down, but as I’ve indicated, we are now also dealing with all kinds of unexpected disturbances. Just one disruptive technology entering an industry can have the effect of an earthquake: the ‘plates’ can move and suddenly an industry can find itself destroyed. Look at what happened with Kodak and film: we all stopped buying film for our cameras.

Luckily, there are things you can do in the face of such disruptions. One is to have an early warning system in place, because you’ll be in a better position if you can detect early signs of trouble; you can make preparations and adjustments. An early warning system would survey all of the external forces that could potentially damage your company. The second thing you can do is scenario planning. A lot of value can come from thinking about what you would do if an extremely pessimistic scenario took place.

Not that this scenario will actually occur, but what would you do if, in fact, things actually got that bad?  Suppose a competitor was to invent a better-quality product and sell it at half your price. What would you do? Another way to stretch your team’s thinking is to have them consider a highly favourable scenario, and what they would do in that case. Such scenario-building exercises have long been used by the military, and they can help companies think about what they would do under different ‘what if’ conditions.

The third thing we need is flexible budgets. Instead of every department having a firm budget, regardless of what happens, each department should be prepared to say what they would cut if they had to cut 20 per cent from their budget, and what amount of money they would ask for if things suddenly got so good that they could capitalize on some amazing new opportunities. These three tools — early warning systems, scenario planning, and flexible budgeting — can provide a strong defense against surprise developments that affect every industry.

Your marketing textbook is in its 13th edition and is used in most MBA Marketing courses worldwide. Are the ‘four Ps’ still a useful framework?

Definitely, because all marketing plans still have to address those four big questions — Product, Price, Place and Promotion. However, we are working on a new framework that will involve a more holistic set of considerations. What we call ‘holistic marketing’ entails the development, design and implementation of marketing programs, processes and activities that recognize a wide range of interdependencies, including the work of integrated marketing (the four Ps); internal marketing (i.e. getting support from the other functional areas); performance marketing (i.e. developing metrics to indicate what you’ve accomplished); and relationship marketing. So this new concept of holistic marketing goes way beyond just the four P’s.

Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

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Internet marketing is accelerating at light speed, with the explosion of Facebook and other social media welcoming businesses into a virtual community of viral expansion and virtually old-fashioned relationships.

Bulletin board-style Web sites are so last millennium, and even e-mail marketing appears so last year unless it’s more honed and targeted to the recipient.

“The day when just having a Web site was good enough is no longer,” says Troy Rumfelt, president of Digital Hill Media. “You need a blog, a YouTube page, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed going out there and all funneling back to your Web site.”

To succeed, social media should involve high-level company officers thoroughly familiar with the brand, in the conversation, such as Bill Samuels Jr., son of the Maker’s Mark founder, and Barry Judge, the blogging and tweeting chief marketing officer of Best Buy.

“People can see through it if they have an intern writing their posts,” says Rumfelt, who has given talks on social media marketing to chambers of commerce in northern Indiana.

“It’s best to have the CEO take 20 minutes out of their day and write a few posts. It’s a great way to build that fan base.”

As important as the medium is, the message is still the center.

“You can’t build a strategy on a platform,” says James Burnes, of Indianapolis, who recently founded Mobiltopia, a venture of Project Brilliant, to provide digital planning for online presence.

“Who in the organization understands our corporate message, understands our language?”

The engagement includes understanding the audiences of different platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, their need for engagement and information, the opportunities to build trust and the strategy for dialogue that includes both outbound messaging and inbound conversation.

“This is all about push-and-pull conversation, not just putting an ad out there,” Burnes says.

A Facebook fan page, for example, can provide information about a company — including timely information about events and special sales — that users find on the screen without looking for it.

A recent advertising campaign by Honda drove viewers to www.facebook.com/Honda rather than the automaker’s own Web site in order to gain more fans.

“Now they’ve got hundreds of thousands of fans that are interested in their product and they can push information to them,” says Chad Pollitt, Digital Hill Media’s representative in Fort Wayne.

Smaller sites focus on specific niches or geographic areas, such as www/smallerindiana.com, which has fewer than 10,000 members and subpages for arts, energy, entertainment, green, marketing, media, opinion, politics, sports, taxes, technology and world.

“There are a lot of industries that have social media platforms,” Burnes says, from commercial office furniture to Colts fans. “Universities are considering social platforms for their alumni base.

“It depends where your customer is. The sales model for most of those places to make money is to sell advertising,” either pay-per-click like Google or display advertising.

Along with social media, Internet marketing can include e-mail campaigns, although experts say mass impersonal blasts from giant stores with “Coupon Inside” are likely to miss some customers.

“There’s an arrogance out there for established brands, and they’re playing a numbers game, assuming someone will click,” Pollitt says. “You need to treat every e-mail address you have as a relationship.

“Then you can segment your e-mail marketing campaign to be more specific to that person. You have to provide value to people in their lives.”

Between the Buns uses e-mail, Twitter and Facebook to give friends the flavor of the restaurant
By GENE STOWE
Tribune Correspondent

Eight years ago, Between the Buns started working to improve a weak Web site and boost online marketing with e-mails that CIO and marketing director Dave Pestrak managed by hand.

Today, the restaurant chain has more than 9,000 people on its e-mail list, 3,000 fans on Facebook and 170 followers on Twitter who enjoy a taste of the eatery’s character in Pestrak’s regular posts and tweets.

The online presence extends Between the Buns’ special events, food and drink specials and other promotions to friends of friends of friends on a two-way street where Pestrak can enjoy compliments and respond to concerns.

“You want that interactivity,” he says, scrolling through a list of good wishes on the restaurant’s 25th anniversary last month. “We have had people who wrote negative things on here. It gives us the ability to respond.

“There is a huge (number) of blogging-type Web sites where people can give restaurant reviews. If I give them a forum to do it, I can deal with it.”

Between the Buns started investing more in the online presence in 2003, when the chain hired Bluehornet.com to manage the e-mail functions, including list maintenance.

A link on the Facebook page allows visitors to sign up for an every-other-week newsletter, identifying segments that are interested in food and drinks specials, sports, special events for adults and kids’ events. They also can recommend their friends and provide e-mails.

“You want the viral aspects,” Pestrak says. “You want friends to refer friends. That’s the whole key to social marketing. It’s what it’s all about.”

About 18 months ago, he created a Between the Buns fan page on his Facebook account. About a year ago, he opened a Twitter account. All carry the flavor of Between the Buns.

“When writing the newsletter and when writing the Facebook and Twitter, I try to inject personality,” Pestrak says, such as joking “I know where my bonus went” when announcing $2,500 in food and drink giveaways during the anniversary.

“You try to put a personal touch in there so they get to know people instead of just a business. We try and have personality at the tables, with the servers – not just ‘Here we are. Come eat. Give me money.’ I try to continue that through our e-mails, our Facebook, our Twitter.

“It has to be social. That has to reflect everywhere here. People didn’t become fans to get commercials.”

The Facebook page includes a gift-giving application where people can send food and drink to their friends. (Facebook blocks pages of users under 21 from receiving alcohol.)

“In my opinion, Twitter is not as popular in the Midwest,” Pestrak says. “It’s an East Coast-West thing. It’s still picking up speed in the Midwest.”

He times the Facebook and Twitter activity to catch people online as they’re getting hungry. Even if they don’t read the alert, it might appear on the computer screen with the Between the Buns logo, keeping top-of-mind awareness for the brand.

“I try and do it at 11 o’clock in the morning, 4 or 5 in the evening,” Pestrak says. “I try to hit people as they’re thinking about lunch or dinner.”

To view article click here

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 Ok, I need to disclose a personal part of me so the rest of this blog will make sense. My name is Cynthia and I am an online marketer; I’ve been in this space since 1996. I have lived through the pimentoloaf.com internet bubble, the obvious bubble burst, and the ups and downs that followed. I’m not an expert by any means but my professional career has grown around the internet.

When I moved to Costa Rica six years ago, I entered the internet stone age. I was used to paying all my bills online, doing my Christmas shopping online and even doing my job online. All of a sudden I was surrounded by paper bills, physically going and standing in lines to do my banking and pay my bills. High speed internet was not available outside of San Jose so ISDN was my best bet. Costa Rica has come a long way since then.

In the time I have lived here, doing business on the internet has evolved leaps and bounds. The banking system was the first to take the gigantic step towards gaining the confidence of the Costa Rican community, online marketplaces, blogs and now social media have followed. Businesses large and small realize that an internet presence is crucial so they are thousands of web pages are floating out there without a purpose. (Many haven’t discovered the magic of SEO yet)

My online initiatives have always been US driven buy in the last year I’ve  been turning my attention to Costa Rica. I have had the good fortune to meet many large business owners that are on board with the online initiative but not quite sure how to get it started. Their marketing firms are still green when it comes to online marketing so whatever they have done so far hasn’t produced large returns or no measurement has been achieved. Traditional media is adopting the call to action message to be .com related but those are few and far between.

With that being said, you can imagine my surprise to be going thru my google reader this am and coming across this article in Adage: Costa Rica’s Pilgrimage Goes Viral. The article spoke about Jotabequ’s online initiative to get people to do the pilgrimage to Cartago online. The idea was great, the site was interactive but why the heck did I not know about this site until 7 months after? I live in Costa Rica, I read the local papers; I am online everyday and nothing, nada until today. (By the way, congrats to Jotabequ for winning a local award for this initiative)

So this brings me to the conclusion that Costa Rica is missing the online buzz. The ideas are there but online road maps are not being laid out. Costa Rica is still stuck on traditional forms of media and ignoring the importance on advertising online, viral marketing and SEO. As veterans in this space, it is our responsibility to get this great country online and create a strong online Tico community. Educate businesses on the online potential that is slipping away day by day.

What have your experiences been doing business online in Costa Rica? What are you doing to instill confidence in within the Tico online community?

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What do you do when you can’t beat your competitor? You bring in the BIG guns. Microsoft recently added FarmVillle to its MSN family of games with the hopes of establishing a bigger presence on Facebook. The trick now was to let the 81 million monthly users of Farmville know that MSN has a home for FarmVille and that Bing is the search engine of choice.

As any mammoth company would do, they threw money at the problem, “farm cash” to be exact. Bing kicked off a Facebook “Fan” page and complimented it by running a sponsored ad on the bottom right of the FarmVille page. Their ad was simple, “become a fan of Bing on Facebook and receive three units of “farm cash””.

 Here are the stats from that campaign:

 12:40pm Tuesday – 8:11am Wednesday – Before the campaign started, Bing had 117,000 “fans”. By 8:11am on Wednesday that number rose to 539,000. As of recently, Bing’s “fan” page has 564,000 fans compared to 524,000 for Google’s fan page. According to AppData, 28.7 million people palyed FarmVille on Tuesday, giving this strategy a 1 to 2 percent click thru rate from players.

 Now that Bing has this fan base, the conversion strategy starts. Fan page postings include “find better tips for FarmVille on Bing” or their latest posting:

 Bing Any FarmVille fans out there? Try using Bing to get the most out of your crops and animals.

We’ve got great results to help you make better decisions in FarmVille.  binged.it

Microsoft’s Facebook strategy seems to be on the right track; getting fans involved through Facebook and getting them to try their decision making engine Bing.

As all of us tackle the social media maze, it’s refreshing to see huge players such as Microsoft tackle the social media market share dilemma one fan at a time, just like us little guys do.

If you had that kind of budget, would you have done anything different?

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I came across this interesting article on searchenginewatch.com and it brought up some great points about how to measure social media.  Once these tools become more mainstream, companies will be confident deploying social media strategies that can produce measurable results.  Below is an excerpt from their article:

“ As with most social media activity, the majority of interactions occur off your site, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t analyze your site’s social media referred visitor segment. To get the most value out of your analysis, you should break the segment into two sub-segments:

1. Social media referred visits that are attributed to your efforts.
2. Social media referred visits that are attributed to individuals outside your company.”

Once you have identified both segments, compile a list and identify which social media networks send the most traffic to your site. A second step would be to research other sites that might be just as beneficial and add them to the list.

You have completed your lists and you are ready to jump in. Fan pages and profiles are created, links pointing to a landing page or your website are set, but how do we measure? There are a number of social media monitoring tools out on the web that are free and on a paid subscription base that you can use:

FREE:
http://www.monitter.com
http://www.search.twitter.com
http://www.twendz.com
http://www.technorati.com

Google analytics – You can now use google analytics for your Facebook pages. (It’s not realtime as it takes a day to take off but its worth it)

FEE BASED:
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.collectiveintellect.com
http://www.techrigy.com

You can pick and chose which tool fits your needs best and apply them to your strategy. Not sure about where to start? Drop us a line and we can help you get your social media strategy started without breaking the bank.

If you would like to read the article in its entirety, click here.

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If you haven’t heard, Microsoft and Yahoo have been approved on a search and advertising deal announced last year. In a nutshell, Yahoo has agreed to use Microsoft’s algorithm for their search product. What does that mean exactly? Do I still optimize my website for all three search engines or do I just focus on Google and Bing? That seems to be the question of the hour according to many SEO professionals.

The project itself is in its infancy and there are a ton of details that need to be figured out. What elements will Yahoo keep for its search experience? What apps will they keep? Facebook and Flickr are huge apps for them so they will need to be integrated. As all these questions come up, one thing is clear, Yahoo will be powered by Bing but the user experience will be all Yahoo.

Even though we are talking about the “Big 3” en search engines, there are other contenders that are just as important. Did you know that YouTube is ranked number 2 in search? It would probably be a good idea to incorporate a video strategy to your search to capture some of that traffic.

So what other search engines are contenders? I have included a list below according to ComScore but among those listed, you will find Ask.com, AOL search (It is powered by Google but not necessarily provides the same results), craigslist even social media’s MySpace and Facebook.

Search is no longer up to the “Big 3” as people will search from the sites they spend the most time on. A well rounded search strategy needs to be more than just optimizing your website for Google, Yahoo and Bing. Incorporate social media and a video strategy to enhance search traffic to your website.

Do you have a search strategy? If so, who are the players that you optimize for?

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Seems like social media is not for the rock band, small business or celebrity anymore.A recent study by Burson-Marsteller showed that the 100 largest Fortune 500 companies are jumping into social media by using one or two social avenues while a smaller group is jumping in with all social media options. Companies seem to be settling in with some social channels more than others, even though there is still a learning curve on how to get the most out of them. Twitter is the leader of the pack with 54%, Facebook 29% and corporate blogs 32%. 20% of those 100 Fortune 500 companies are using all of the social media options mentioned.

This is still unchartered territory as many companies don’t know how to measure these channels or are not clear on what exactly they are getting from it. Many Fortune 500 companies are seeing positive results from their Facebook Fan Page and Twitter strategies. Corporate blogs are still around providing fresh content but are being updated 7 or 8 times a month on average.

So, after all those statistics, what have Fortune 500 companies learned about social media? Social media is becoming the “gauge of the people”, a real time suggestion box where the consumer will be heard using a plethora of social media options. You don’t have to wait anymore to see how well your product did or how your latest ad campaign is doing; just ask the masses, they are only a post away.

The million dollar question is: Is there a downside to this real time communication? Could social media become a niche for a specific size of company? So far, small and medium companies are benefiting from the unlimited resources of free advertising using creativity and out of the box thinking. Also, traditional media is financially acquired (Fortune 500 companies with their multi million dollar Ad budgets) while social media is dominated by content. (Free, free and free) That means that the smallest contender can become a giant among the masses and take some of the limelight away from these massive ad campaigns with some savvy content and a fresh point of view.

By no means am I saying that Fortune 500 companies are doomed when it comes to social media but the rules of the game are changing. Can these companies adjust, learn and succeed at the rate of change? Stay tuned…

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