BlogWorks

More Small Businesses Using Social Media to Level the Playing Field

By Marian Short
Senior Account Executive, MediaQuotient

According to Shel Holz, while some small companies may feel more hesitant about engaging consumers through social media, doing so can potentially benefit them more than their larger competitors – while using a smaller marketing budget.

A new survey by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows that not only are more small businesses turning to social media venues for increased ROI and heightened visibility, but 75 percent of respondents discovered ways of improving efficiency and almost half identified new products and services that utilize social media. Incredibly, one CEO actually slashed his marketing budget by 80 percent by successfully using social media channels. Mashable reported that Facebook and LinkedIn lead the pack for small-business social media engagement and was intrigued to see how much Twitter adoption rates will fluctuate.

Kondek Speaks

By Charlie Kondek
Director, New Media Relations

I was absolutely thrilled to be profiled at Bulldog Reporter. I got to sound off on a lot of things dear to me, not just our business but the future of our industry. For example:

Q: What do you make of the whole "who owns digital" debate?

"Owning digital" is probably the wrong way to put it. I'd say in general PR should own social media and advertising should own online advertising and content creation. But, of course, these distinctions are blurring. Honestly, while the lines between PR and advertising are fuzzy, operationally there are still some very big distinctions between the disciplines that make the separations reasonable and determine that PR, in fact, should own digital. PR is the discipline of participation in media, and that's exactly what digital or social media is—participation-based. Advertising is the discipline of disruptive media—and I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all; the best advertising is a welcome disruption. But in general, these demarcations are pretty fair; advertising builds the cool site, PR extends it into social media.

Those hard, fast lines are really malleable, though. Some ad agencies do great "outreach" into social media and some PR firms (like my own) build great content. Expect this to be a constant adjustment in the years to come. In the short term, it's clear the best brands get their agencies working together for the best possible mix.

Facebook Metrics Businesses Have Been Longing For

By Eden Litt
Web Project Manager

Last week, Facebook released a new feature for fan page administrators that will greatly benefit our clients. Authenticated pages with at least 10,000 fans will now feature two new metrics under status updates: Raw Impressions and Feedback Rate.

But what do they mean?

Raw Impressions indicate the number of times a post has “rendered.” In other words, every time the post is displayed on the page’s wall, in a fan’s live or news feed, or in a Facebook widget, it counts as an impression.
Feedback Rate calculates the number of comments and likes received on a post per impression. The formula equates to (Comments + Likes)/Impressions.

In addition to gathering more numbers on fans, these metrics will allow admins to better gauge their fans’ interactions with posts. This will allow us to better target content and timing of posts. While there are many more metrics we’re still dying to know, Facebook is taking baby steps in becoming more hospitable to the business world.

Changes to HelpAReporter.com Reflect E-mail Harvesting

If you're like me and my team of social media relations specialist, you subscribe to Peter Shankman's newsletter, Help A Reporter Out. Three times a business day, without fail, you get list of several queries from writers, freelancers, journalists and bloggers working on stories to which you and your clients may be able to contribute. But if you've perused your Shankmans lately you'll have noticed a change. No longer does the query, which gives subject, need and deadline, list the writer's e-mail address. Rather, it's a coded e-mail that goes into a new hub and relays the message to the writer. So for example, queries that used to appear with the e-mail "foodblogger@suchandsuch.com" will now appear as "queryxxy@helpareporter.com."

Why the change? You guessed it: too many writers were getting irrelevant e-mails from PR and marketing people like us. I had a chance to ask Shankman about it, and he said in an e-mail, "Too many people harvesting e-mails, too many people adding to lists, too many people spamming and not playing nice. We didn't have a choice." Shankman has always been explicit about how to use Help a Reporter Out, so this is no surprise. But it is a shame it had to come to this; I have made numerous valuable friendlies from the newsletter and will continue to endeavor to do so within the new rules. As Shankman might say, play nice!

What does this mean for PR people like me? You have to be quicker in responding to these queries, you can't let them pile up and then go through them all at once. The coded e-mails used in the newsletter are only live until the deadline set by the writer. In other words, if a writer tells you he is working on a story and his deadline is 5:00 P.M. EST, at 5:01 the e-mail queryxxy@helpareporter.com will go dead.

It's OK to Be Anti-Social

By Nichole Mrasek
Account Supervisor

Feeling socially overwhelmed online? From Facebook to LinkedIn, there is a social network ready to connect you to friends, old schoolmates, boyfriends/girlfriends and family. A new social networking site, By/Association, unclutters the news feed noise and caters to people with specific networking needs.

The site touts itself as exclusive and inherently important. From the company’s Web site: “By/Association is a community of remarkable individuals, hand-selected to seed inspiring and unexpected introductions.”

The site offers exclusivity by requiring that members join through an application process. And don’t worry about finding a good profile picture. The New York Times reports that the network doesn’t allow searching for people or pictures. This is because the site has one main purpose: networking. Its mission is to offer a place where people can connect and share ideas, philosophies and enrich projects they are working on, and, ultimately, their lives,

“The site covers London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, with plans to expand to Toronto and Chicago by the end of the year,” according to the Times.

The site is definitely off to a clean start. But will it eventually evolve, as other online platforms have, and open its policies to meet the demands that its network will eventually create?

Read the full feature for more details and an interview with the site’s founder, The Anti-Social-Network Social Network.

BlogHer Earns More Funding, Continues Growth

By Alicia Dorset

Proving that BlogHer is the force to be reckoned with when it comes to women and blogging, the site has received an additional $7 million in funding, according to a recent post by Kara Swisher of All Things Digital.

Swisher reports that BlogHer now employs 30 people and the network itself reaches more than 14 million unique visitors a month.

If you haven’t had the chance to read some of the great content on BlogHer’s site or attend one of their conferences, make sure to spend some time at their web site. You can read the entire All Things Digital report here.

Yet Another Tool for IMing, Emailing, etc…

By Andrea MacLean

Google wants to change the way people communicate online by blending instant messaging, e-mail and document collaboration into a new service, called Wave. The free service will eliminate the need to use multiple tools to communicate online, according to Google execs, and will be available to the public later this year.

Software developers are being encouraged to create features that are compatible with Wave and web site owners or bloggers will be able to incorporate Wave’s messaging features as a bulletin board, for example.

Pretty cool, although we will have to wait and see whether consumers will be willing to leave behind their current e-mail, IM, etc and ride the Google Wave. Is there anything Google can’t do? Sigh.

The Post-Processing Technique

By Lyndsay Hoban

Groundswell author Josh Bernoff gave the keynote speech at the IAB Marketplace: Social Media last Monday, emphasizing the need to look at social media as a long-term trend.

Bernoff outlined the Groundswell P-O-S-T process (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) and highlighted successful examples of P-O-S-T in practice, including Tampax’s BeingGirl community and Hershey’s use of Houseparty.com for the launch of the Bliss line of chocolates.

He concluded his address with a focus on measurement, stating that successful use of social media must have meaningful metrics and clear objectives. “When it comes to social media, people really need to hear this,” he said.

Read his measuring sticks and the full article here.

Name Squatting

Did someone take your client’s Twitter name? Perhaps these WSJ tips can help straighten things out.

Cyberlife After Death

By Eden Litt

It’s a morbid topic, but an important one nonetheless. Given the boom in social media in recent years, think about all the accounts you’ve established: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, eBay and so on. What happens to your digital life after you die?

Companies have already started projects to address this quandary, from virtual graveyards and memorial pages to cyber lockers used to store digital assets. CNN investigates several posthumous Web 2.0 services here.

Got Questions?

By Don Martelli

Ever wanted to know the population of Wales, Wisconsin? What plant family a pea is from? How many single-spaced pages 35,000 words in Finnish equate to? How about the heart disease risk of 50-year-old men?

Ask no more, Wolfram|Alpha is here (from the Web site):

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge engine (read: not Google) that provides answers with real supporting data and facts. On the surface it sounds like a great concept, but the jury is still out on its use and whether or not it is a true Google (or Wikipedia for that matter) competitor.

]]> One simple thing Wolfram|Alpha can help our teams with is answering those pesky (yet extremely important) metric questions. For example, what is the daily visitor total of Mashable.com? What about the circulation of Readers Digest vs. People Magazine?

Wolfram|Alpha is a good example of technological innovation colliding with discovery. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves and whether it will compete with (or as act as a supplement to) Google and Wikipedia as key information sources.

So, what do you want to know?

How Celebs Do Facebook

Mashable has put together “5 Lessons Celebrities Can Teach Us About Facebook Pages.” From Vin Diesel to Lenny Kravitz, Britney Spears to Michael Phelps, check out their Facebook tips here.

iPhone’s Appealing, Inexpensive Apps Driving Mobile Ad Growth

By Marian Short

Mobile ad spending could nearly double this year to $200 million, due largely to the iPhone’s runaway success, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Companies are keen to access the iPhone’s desirable owner base: young, well paid, highly engaged with mobile tech and currently over 20 million strong. While numerous advertisers offer streaming video ads to smart phones, an increasing number are creating—or redesigning—downloadable apps to lure in a demographic that is minimally responsive to TV advertising. Not only do iPhone apps tend to be cheap, they also capture higher levels of engagement. For example, a recent and successful hamburger app for California-based CKE Restaurants Inc. cost $12,000, while a Burger King app launched for Valentine’s Day was downloaded by 14 percent of its mobile audience. Compare those with a less-than-one-percent interaction rate for online banner ads.

]]> For more details you can read the full article from the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Fast Company’s blog also posted on the WSJ article and pointed out that companies have yet to really incorporate other iPhone. Medialets, however, has become the first company to roll out a “shakeable” ad for its Levi’s Dockers campaign, which takes advantage of the motion sensor.

Ever Wonder What Your Mom is Doing Online?

By Nicole Burguess

A recent study by the Marketing to Moms Coalition identified the top activities for moms online by surveying 1,033 English-speaking moms.

It’s no surprise that e-mail is a very popular activity for moms online, even topping out TV as the most popular media habit in two of the three age groups. When it comes to spreading the word via e-mail, moms are most likely to share jokes and information about upcoming events. They also frequently share news clips and inspirational phrases. However, they are somewhat less likely to share videos and images. Young moms frequently share blog posts, whereas moms in the 25-44 and 45+ age ranges do not.

]]> Overall, moms spend an average of three hours online each day. Aside from checking/sending e-mail, the other top online activities for moms include:
* Online banking
* Reading news
* Checking weather
* Product research and price comparisons
* Gaming
* Shopping for children and for themselves
* Planning travel
* Researching healthcare information

Sixteen percent of moms surveyed use formal networks for blogging, but mom bloggers skew young overall, with 22 percent of moms aged 18-24 years old blogging.

Click here for the MarketingCharts.com recap of the mom survey, or download the report from Marketing to Moms Coalition.

Traditional Media’s Increasing Presence in the Digital Space

By Nichole Mrasek

There has been a surge in traditional media adapting to social media trends, and Mashable’s Woody Lewis shares his thoughts on the ‘5 Ways Traditional Media is Going Social.’

Topics include:
* Widget TV: Verizon FiOS customers will soon be able to connect set-top boxes to the Web. Verizon is building widgets that integrate Facebook and Twitter. Lewis writes, “These are base cases, where the viewer can send messages from her set-top box to her social network while she watches programs. Verizon will offer the SDK to third-party developers.”

]]> * Pitch the Editor-in-Chief: BusinessWeek’s Editor-In-Chief John Byrne has taken to Twitter. You can submit “What’s Your News Story Idea,” a link on his profile, where pitches are reviewed by Bryne, and at least one pitch is assigned to a BusinessWeek journalist.
* Newspapers on YouTube: With the increasing decline in subscriptions, newspapers are turning to online efforts to help promote stories and features. Newspapers like The New York Times want to feature more special-interest stories.
* Bookstore Trailers: Publishers are featuring trailers for books on YouTube. Check out Random House author Annie Burrows talking about her novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
* Literati as Twitterati: Publishing icon Harper Collins is experimenting in the social media landscape with a well-received HarperStudio presence on Twitter.