Posted by Edwin Ritter in Cloud Computing, E-Commerce, SEO, Trends.
Tags: analytics, big data, data mining, internet, metrics, SEO, Social Media, Trends, web metrics
As 2012 reaches the half way mark, here is a post on one of this years' hot topics. This is the first of three.
What is big data? How big is big? Think Yottabytes. So much data is now collected that 90% of the online data was created in just the last two years. Simply stated, everything you do on the web is tracked and creates data. It is then stored, sliced, diced and analyzed. The growth in data is due to proliferation of smart phones and tablets, lower storage costs and improved analytical tools. This article reveals 10 ways in which big data will have an impact.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Grab Bag, Trends.
Tags: advertising, NY Giants, Social Media, Super Bowl
During the recent (and, tremendous) SuperBowl, there was a lot of social media activity. Here is a good post from my friend and fellow Giants fan (and, Jersey alum) that summarizes topics discussed online - a record number of tweets among them. Note - I was unplugged during the game also.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, google, 4Square, best practice, linkedin, yelp, foursquare, customer, consumer, word of mouth, wom, dialogue, customer interactions
Now that we have been practicing for some time, we are aware of good (and, bad) ways to employ social media. Opinions will vary about the ‘best of the best’. That is the beauty of the web, it always changes. From a book summary I read on social media, here are some of the best practices according to the author at this point in time. The full abstract about the book is available here. This is not an exhaustive, all inclusive list. The basics are covered and should align with your current techniques for using social media effectively.
There are multiple platforms* available for your content and they should be used relative to the target audience. Perhaps due to timing, one platform not mentioned is Goolge+. Having likeable content is a fundamental criteria for success. Get your customer to listen to you and then….
- Listen first, and never stop listening - You want to know what customers think. Ask and they will tell you. Next, the most important thing to do is listen. Closing the loop by acting on what your customers tell you will prove that you not only listened, but that you understand and can do something about it.
- Define your target audience better than ever – There are many tools that allow you can focus on your true demographics for your product/service(s). Define them and determine what will make them ‘like’ your content.
- Think – and act – like your consumer – Remember, it’s about them, not you. Don’t sell them; instead, provide content this is of interest to them. Get them talking about topics of interest and find ways to integrate your wares into their lifestyle.
- Invite your customers to be your first fans – Word of mouth (WOM) is key here. The more likes you get, the better your credibility. Be clear about your value proposition and define what is in it for them. Remember, there is no value add if only your employees are interacting with your content.
- Create true dialogue with, and between, your customers – Related to listening and being genuine. Get them talking about you to leverage the WOM effect. When your customers share tips, tricks with others, it proves they are engaged. It also saves you from providing customer support directly. Help guide the discussion by acknowledging comments – and, correct where needed.
- Be Authentic – Get connected by being demonstrating an interest in your customers. Personalize it by including your name.
- Be Honest and transparent – You can spot a phony a mile away. Your customers can too.
- Integrate social media into the entire customer experience – Another fundamental for success and canot be stressed enough. Make sure everyone who interacts with your customers has the same message and is aware of promotions and specials. Regardless of how they find you, it should be consistent messaging. The last thing you want is a dis-connect among channels and mis-managed expectations from your customers. If they are online, they can tell their network about you – the good and the bad.
- Don’t sell! Just make it easy and compelling for customers to buy - They already found your content and are engaged. Don’t insult them with a bland sales pitch. State the (relative) value proposition clearly and make it easy to ‘Add to Cart‘.
*Platforms range from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Blogs and specialized networks (e.g. – flickr, yelp, etc.)
Having a dialogue with your customers is easy using a social media platform. I would add that you keep in mind how you want to be treated. After all, we all are consumers in the end.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Grab Bag, Trends.
Tags: Social Media
You can find lots of information on the state of social media. Everyone not only has an opinion, but, is also willing to share. Myself included. There are posts that talk about the rapid pace of change, how social media is still evolving, what is the latest and greatest trend and so on. I submit that at this point, we move past that. Yes, it changes. Yes, it moves quickly and yes, we have tools to connect and share very easily. In all the maelstrom of change, let’s remember the basics. Like common sense – which, isn’t always common. Below is a post from a Linkedin groups that is worth sharing. The comments are from Robert Fleming, President of the eMarketing Association.
Here are Robert’s 5 points of where we are with Social Media:
1. GOOGLE+ JOINS THE FRAY – Expect to see more and more social channels emerge, most will fail (although not Google+), so focus on what has critical mass today. That would be Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Linkedin. Rule number 1 – Focus.
2. READ YOUR TOC’S – Build a great page, fan base or whatever and then get kicked off the network, by the network. Do you want to run a contest for Facebook Fans, woopsy daisy, read the Facebook TOC’s on contests or you may just be out of a contest and a Facebook page. See the article below, if you are promoting via a contest on Facebook: (Rule number 2 – Read and understand the TOC’s)
https://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
3. SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS ARE WRONG – Some of the time. Hey, everybody is (ok, even me). In a media channel moving as fast as Social (25 million+ users on Goggle+ in a month), things are constantly evolving. Rule number 3 – What is right today may be wrong tomorrow.
4. ADVERTISING IS STILL ADVERTISING – No matter what the channel or media, some things never change. You have to grab attention, persuade, and measure in virtually all advertising programs. There are different approaches for Television vs YouTube, but the objective is the same, to sell your brand, service or product. Rule number 4 – the basics of advertising are timeless.
5. YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SOCIAL MARKETING PROGRAM – No you don’t. Especially if you are not willing to devote the time, money and energy necessary to do it well. Rule number 5 – All marketing programs require energy, poor marketing can can be worse than no marketing and actually hurt your product, service or brand.
I find these are refreshingly straight forward, candid and on the mark. Common sense, even. Don’t forget what you know. Maintain focus. I especially enjoy Robert’s take on # 3 above : ‘what is right today may be wrong tomorrow’. So, keep watching and be aligned with changes.
What’s your take? How will you influence where social media goes?
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: behavior, research, Social Media
While writing my last post on changes in social behavior, I found these other charts on social media and I wanted to share them.
Phases of Social Media adoption
This chart shows a phased transition in social media behavior. The mindshift milestones are accurate as a key enabler for the next phase. For me, overall these phases are related to the Forrester behavior ladder with level of engagement I mentioned in my previous post.
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Web 2.0 Adoption Curve
I like this 2nd chart for what is says looking forward but I don’t agree with the most recent past. I don’t think we failed as much as is shown; likewise for disappointment. I agree that there is a proportional relationship in perceived value with level of engagement. We are very competent right now and always are smarter in the future. 
I hope you find this useful and they provide you with some insights as we continue on this social journey.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: behavior, research, Social Media
Watching the evolution of behaviors in social media is always interesting and provides valuable insights. Back in 2007, when social media really started to take off, I came across this chart from Forrester that describes the various behavior segments. Visually, it provides a quick self-identification of where you are on the behavior ladder in terms of involvement with social media. The segments remain viable and Forrester recently indicated our behavior segments are changing with a rise in joiners along with a plateau in creators. Joiners will continue to look for ways to share and keep up with peers. Expect tools to make this easier still and marketing efforts should continue to focus on social networking next year and beyond. We have several data points now with these segments and Forrester will continue to monitor and update us on the behaviors going forward. If you have access to their latest chart, please post.
Social Behavior ladder
My behavior has changed and continues to evolve. I find it varies based on what topic is top of mind at any point in time. In the end, we are all consumers. What part of the ladder are you on and how has your behavior changed? Will you consume more and create less?
Oct. 1 – Some follow up thoughts on this post :
1) I added some additional charts available here on behaviors. Hope you enjoy them.
2) I looked back at the original article from Forrester in 2007 and noticed it was written by Charlene Li – no wonder I liked the article.
3) Links to both the original article and the related update on current behavior.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: Social Media, tweet
It occurred to me recently that the act of ‘tweeting’ actually has been around a long time. While Twitter is now mainstreamed as a common way to send short, bursty messages, the act itself is really an old practice found in traditional media channels. Consider these examples :
- telegrams
- stock ticker
- newspaper headlines
- sports scores
- magazine articles
- billboard advertisements
- voice mail
In each of those forms, there is a focused message to quickly grab interest and convey enough information to entice the reader to obtain more information. Except for voice mail of course – you get the idea.
And this is not limited to just text, either. We also capture and share images via Flickr, picasso and such to communicate visually.
Tweets, by another name, are also found in these digital platforms :
- FaceBook status updates and wall messages
- FriendFeed, Plaxo, Flickr, LinkedIn
- cell phone text messages
- paid search keyword ads
- blog posts
So, while we talk a lot about the tool whether it is Flickr, Twitter or whatever, we have used short form messaging in various forms for some time. Are we getting better at it? Are we more or less focused as a result?
Imma keep it short and let you tell me.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: Facebook, FB, Social, Social Media
One thing I’ve noticed with trends and fads is that looking back on them, we usually say “What were we thinking?” With the passage of enough time, it can be difficult to remember what motivated us at the time. The reason(s) why something that was so important changed into the commonplace and then, a drudgery or worse, not cool anymore becomes lost over time. We’ve all seen example of this and the same progression will occur with Social Media. I maybe ahead of the curve of this, but there will come a time when FB will no longer be de rigueur but, instead, passe. Will you remember where you were at this pivotal future moment? It will happen at some point. Certainly not a question of if, but of when. When it does, will that moment become an indelible memory for you? One social media statistic I heard recently was that if FaceBook (FB) was a country, it would the 3rd largest in the world with over 500M users, er, ‘netizens’. Will they experience the same future gestalt and log off FB never to return?
Another thing I’ve noticed is that trends based solely on technology have a finite lifetime. We tend to stay with something even when it is past its’ prime. Comfort, resistant to change, the migration effort and learning curve involved all play a part of staying with status quo, the familiar. We accept trade-offs and shortcomings; we settle. Until, of course, a game changer comes along. The bright, new shiny bauble that excites you. Entices you; teases you. You have to have it.
As someone once said ‘Technology is cyclical’, there will be another widget/new thing to displace FB and occupy our time. It will have to be better, more convenient, easier. Also, it will need to make money. At some point in the (not too distant?) future, there will be a seminal moment when many of us will say “FB? I haven’t used it in months. Who does that anymore?”
Predictions invited – what lifetime do you think FB will have? We will still use it in 5 years? 3 years? Next year? Let me know – if I get enough responses, I update the post with a summary of the feedback. Thanks in advance, til then see you on FB.
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: Social Media, tweets, Twitter
What’s in a tweet? Well, actually, there is a lot. There is the visible text of 140 characters, of course. But, you might be surprised to know that tweet text is only part of the information conveyed when using twitter. Behind each tweet, some of what is included is the tweet unique id, the author’s user id, his/her url, biography and the tweet creation date. Other tweet information includes time zone where the author resides, number of tweets, followers, favorites, how long he/she has been tweeting, country and the application used to generate the tweet.
tweet map screen shot
Most twitter users do not need to know this. Analytic types and software developers can use this as a structure to monitor trends, verify applications, integrate with other social media platforms and so on.
A shout out to @raffi on twitter for documenting this. I found this via one of his tweets. You can view all the details via this PDF on google docs.
screen shot of tweet behind the scenes
Did you realize all that was included in each tweet? Do you care? Let me know via a comment here, or send me a tweet! My id is @efr0702
Tweet on!
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.
Tags: Social Media
By now, there is no question Social Media (SM) is here to stay. Everyday, it is further integrated into the digital mainstream. While many are active online, there are still many who are not. To get started with SM, the basics are no different from deciding which movie to watch or what car to buy. You learned how to make those choices and you use that framework with social media as well. There are many SM tools to choose from (!) to engage in the community. In no time, you will be twittering, writing on FaceBook and post on digg or delicious.
Good news - there are lots of ways to get started. The web has, like, lots of advice on getting started in blogs and other web site articles. You may want to use offline sources also – magazines, newspapers and books even.
Start slow. Use the ‘crawl, walk, the run’ approach. You can also check my previous post on why to use twitter .
Think of it this way – you watch TV and see lots of car commercials from many car companies, but you don’t/can’t buy every type of car. Pick another topic, same scenario. You simply cannot do everything, be everywhere, see everything online. The digital web data stream is huge and keeps growing. To navigate and be active in SM, learn how to filter and make choices based on your interests and other criteria.
Keep it simple.
It’s like making an entrance at a party. You don’t always know who’s there and where they might be. You look around, search for someone familiar and talk to them. As you interact within the SM community, you will make choices and begin to filter out things that are not of interest to you and find the topics that are. Same thing here – use what you know initially and you will learn how to navigate the SM landscape – it’s easier than you think.
Next time you hear someone say ‘I don’t know how to get started’, tell them to start with what they know and expand from there. They will learn what is good, bad; like, dislike and so on. It’s all part of the journey.
Be safe out there, enjoy the ride and see you on the web! BTW, how did you get started?
