At this time of year, many are thinking about going on a diet. So it seems apropos that I heard an interview on the Bob Edwards Radio Hour with Clay A. Johnson about his new book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. I was intrigued with his analogy that our information consumption is like our junk food consumption. We are barraged with information, but so much of it is junk, crafted with bias for Google search results, clicks and advertisers and requires an educated consumer to know what to ingest and how much.

Johnson was one of the architects of the much noted social media campaign for President Obama’s first election and has the likes of Bill O’Reilly and others on an information diet. He does more than tell you about the problem, but how to stop ingesting empty information calories.

While I have not read this book, I plan to in the coming month.  I look forward to learning how to craft my own information diet and would love to hear from others who have adopted thoughtful information strategies.

Okay, so it happened. Our blog has been silent for six-months, and despite what we tell our clients about planning and teamwork and the importance of keeping momentum, we blew it. It took a potential client who decided not to talk to us because our social media had “flat-lined” to be hit over the head with it.

If a social media marketing firm can’t keep it going, then who can?  Our reasons (excuses) are the same you might have- lack of resources, clients come first, and always a lack of time. We have no shortage of ideas, and we have always had a sustainable content strategy, but we lost our way.

When we started this blog in 2008, we posted twice/week, then went down to once/week, and finally, maybe more like once/month. I assigned writers from the internal team, I found guest bloggers occasionally, but in the end, it fell to me, the face and voice of the company, to get it done. Today, when I heard that the prospect passed on us, I was truly humbled. Our ability to keep their content going for the long-term is brought into question.  I could only agree with their decision to pass.

Now that I have confessed,  what can I do about it? How can we redeem ourselves and build trust for new clients to see? The only way I know how: own it and make good on it.

So, as I drove back to the office to write this post, I decided to use this learning experience for a series of posts that help marketing professionals keep on track.

I plan to address the following:

• How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again?
• What have other companies done and have they regained their position?
• What are realistic goals for small shops?
• Why you MUST get back on the horse.

If you have a story to share, contact me. I’d love to hear it.

Now, finally, I am going to push the publish button and finally get back on the horse.

Today’s Wall Street Journal was riddled with examples of “smart” people in high places making age-old mistakes.  And it’s the oldest stuff in the book.

Yahoo’s CEO misstated his college degree on his online biography. This would have been no big deal until Mr. Thompson decided to lie about how it got there by blaming a search firm. That is when the cover up got him fired. Does this remind anyone of the Martha Stewart lie that put her in jail?

Best Buy’s new CEO was caught having an affair with a subordinate and resigned, but the Founder and Chairman didn’t tell the ethics committee and is off the board.

Is this arrogance or ignorance? Do they believe they are too valuable to get fired or do they believe they won’t get caught?  Maybe it is simply lack of common sense. In the case of the CFO tweets, the comments were blatantly unprofessional.

We can spend our time wondering how this stuff still happens, or see the writing on your Facebook wall: it’s hard to get away with bad behavior if you plan to publish it on line.

Good behavior is not just required of the ordinary employee. Executives are under closer scrutiny than ever, given that companies are judged by the hiring decisions they make.  These executives put their boards in a difficult position, their brand in a bad light, and can put the company’s stock price in peril. Best Buy is already struggling to compete with Amazon and Apple, Yahoo with Google. A blaring WSJ headline is certainly not going to help.

Ethics and social media policies are not just for the lowly, and they could be intertwined with an overall media policy. If these companys have them, did they share them with the executives who made these mistakes? I’d love to know how your company handles your code of conduct. Let us know. We won’t tell.

Today, a big change came to Facebook brand pages, and will require your attention to fully harness the new opportunities for your page.  Brand pages are a highly visible part of your interaction with customers, and Facebook has made changes that will help you improve your ability to interact.

Cover Photo
First and foremost, you will need to bring your attention to the cover photo on your page, which will replace the current 5 thumbnails. This image is a great opportunity to draw in users from the moment they arrive.

Timelines
Like personal profile pages, brand pages will now have timelines. You can add milestones to showcase the company history and even pin important posts at the top for up to 7 days so important news doesn’t get buried.

About Section
The about section has moved, along with other landing page tabs and will blur the lines between ads, company content and likes. They will now be on the right. You will be able to order these tabs as well, and hide the likes tab if your like numbers are low.

New Content and Organization
Added to the mix is Facebook Offers, which allow brands to distribute coupons to fans directly on their timeline, more visible apps to graphics vs text links, and a highlights feed, which can be customized and moderated.

Direct Fan Communication
Fans will now be able to contact a brand directly vs post on their wall, which requires more monitoring time, but could keep some negative content off your page.

Admin Panel and Insights
Finally, the admin panel has been reconfigured to have everything in one place. The stats will be real-time, and non-admins will actually have access to the data about a particular page through the Likes box.

We strongly recommend you begin making updates to your page before Facebook moves to the new design on March 30, and as always, let us know how we can be of assistance.

Links to articles about the new Facebook Brand pages you may enjoy:

10 changes to Facebook you need to know
Facebook Timeline Branded Pages Are Here
Facebook Timeline for Brands: The Complete Guide
Facebook Brand Pages: 4 ways to humanize your brand

Series 1 on Social Media in Highly Regulated Industries

Some in the financial industry think it simpler to abandon social media, but for most, they are stuck in a difficult juxtaposition as they are expected to grow their book of business, but then told they cannot use all the tools available to do so. My Edwards Jones money manager is forbidden to use Facebook for business, and the company won’t allow her to have access to the site from her office.  Merrill Lynch just recently began allowing their employees to use LinkedIn, but under strict guidelines.

With social media in full swing these days, what is it that keeps the highly regulated industries from swimming with the rest?  The difference might be in the government regulations rather than in the social medium.  Banks are regulated by the OCC, investment firms are regulated by the SEC and other industries like legal and real estate are heavily regulated at the State level.   The biggest challenge is that companies would need to monitor online activity for all of their employees and make sure no laws are broken, or invest in social media training as a matter of prevention. This costs money, but does the cost outweigh the benefit? Facebook and Linkedin have already been shown to be rich oil fields of prospects and clients, so how can these companies maneuver safely and confidently within those realms?

For several years, I worked with a large family owned real estate company headquartered in Connecticut, where we immersed more than 2000 agents in social media training. This occupation is about relationships, yet agents were fearful of the platform, mainly because they could not grasp how to use it. I heard more than once, “I don’t want people to know my phone number, my address” To which I replied “isn’t it the same as posting a sign with your face and phone number in front of your customers’ houses?”

On a similar level, companies are fearful of employee missteps online where everything published can be tracked.  Every highly regulated industry has guidelines for conduct, but now these guidelines must be extended to social media channels.  Training on acceptable use of social media, and monitoring, must be implemented to ensure those guidelines are followed.

Social media has already knocked on the door of each and every company and will not go away. Time will tell who manages to work within strict regulations to take advantage of the growth opportunities of social media, and who gets left behind.

Thanks to contributing writer Lori Vintilescu.

Over the past few years, there have been a mind-boggling number of technology innovations. So many, that it has our heads spinning. As for social networks this past year, the launch of Google+ was big. But, by all reports, the next big thing is Pinterest. Pinterest has over 4 million registered users as of this week and is growing rapidly. 1.5 million of the predominately female audience visit Pinterest every day – spending 14 minutes on the site on average.

Alexa.com reports “Pinterest.com is ranked #133 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings… The site’s visitors view 10.7 unique pages each day on average.”

In our individual attempts to make sense of the vast sea of information that the internet gives us access to, we bookmark things in our browsers, we like things in Facebook, and now you can Pin things to boards in Pinterest. This is more than a personal organizing tool, it is a social tool, where you find friends and other people who like what you like. If you thought you had seen it all, trust me, you haven’t. Whatever your interest, it’s already pinned to a board somewhere on Pinterest, and easy to find with categories and search.  In fact, it’s fun and by many accounts, addictive. Once you’ve found pictures of your favorite place in the world, you want to keep looking.

For businesses who have visual products, whether it is fashion, art or power tools, Pinterest is a great tool for getting feedback from your audience on what they like. I created this board to collect my favorite Marketing Infographics. I search Pinterest to repin things to my board from other boards, and was notified immediately when someone liked my image.

We marketers know that there is plenty of content out there to curate and share with our audiences to engage them. Pinterest makes it visual. Business applications abound. For instance, interior design firms create thematic boards to show clients and get feedback.  A pet store might have a cute puppy contest where entrants post photos. The winner is the pinner who got the most repins. The examples are endless.

Businesses can create their own account and add the pin it icon to their website so visitors can pin images from your site that they like.  If you have a Facebook business strategy, this works well with it since Pinterest integrates with Facebook and has an iPhone app for pinning where ever you are. For SEO purposes, when a user pins one of your images to their board, it links back to you, adding to your inbound links and making your site more relevant.

We will be hearing more about how this tool will work for marketers. I encourage you to share your Pinterest strategy, and even better, share your Pinterest links. Weber Media has just started using the tool. Go find us at http://pinterest.com/WeberMedia/.

On the surface, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) sounds like a good idea – to punish those who pirate intellectual property. As an writer and artist, I am all too aware of the dangers of posting your work and then finding it elsewhere, without your permission. Imagine the cost implications for movie studios, record labels, and of course the individual who has few resources to go after the culprit.

The idea behind this bill, according to those who have followed the debate, was sound. The result, however, has been described as a threat to free speech, web-related businesses, users who upload content, internal networks, open source software, and internet security and could lead to a global collapse of the internet.

These accusations are based in the assertion that the bill only broadly defines what is a violation, puts any consumer who hosts a website at risk of violation, and holds internet services such as YouTube responsible for the content their users upload. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology criticize the bill’s wording as vague enough that “a single complaint about even a major website could be enough to cause the site to be blocked, with the burden of proof then resting on the website to get itself un-blocked.”

EFF has indicated that companies like Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo would have little choice but to shut down if the bill becomes law.

Defenders of the bill say that it will protect revenues of content creators and protect against counterfeit drugs. Companies that rely on copyright, including the Motion Picture Association of American, Pfizer, Nike, and L’Oreal support the bill, as does the AFL-CIO and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce.

On Wednesday, January 18th, Reddit plans a 12-hour knowledge blackout in protest of the bill. As this bill evolves and the House Judiciary Committee continues to debate it, you can keep apprised of it’s progress through our legal system by visiting the Wikipedia article, which is updated daily.

As someone who was around for the very beginning of the wild wild web, we have certainly come a long way. I am not surprised that there are those who try to profit from the content of others. Now, let’s see what we do about it.

Google+ business pages went public on November 7, and they are already making an impact on the social media landscape. The number of visitors to Google’s latest social media venture is up 25% this month, compared to October. Much of this traffic is a result of organizations looking to stake their claim in this new social sphere, even if they are not quite sure how this newest channel will fit into their existing social media plan.

We here at Weber Media Partners excitedly dove into Google+ two weeks ago. The hard work came in the days after. This month, we are working on our plan to integrate this new service into our existing social media marketing program and develop exclusive content for this new site.

Today, I will share with you some of our Google+ insights. If you’re debating whether or not to join, struggling with your content creation or curious about what other brands are already up to, here’s a “Pluses and Minus” list to get you started.

If you’ve already set up a Facebook business page, then setting up your Google+ page will be a breeze. This easy set-up is definitely a PLUS. If it only takes a few minutes, why not claim your place in the network. Bank of America learned the hard way about the errors of slow adoption – a parody site launched on Google Plus before the official brand page, confusing visitors and embarrassing the company.

Need help setting up your Google+ business page? This blog post and slide show from Mashable offers you a great step-by-step guide, along with examples of some top Google+ brand pages.

Hangouts are another PLUS. This tool, unique to Google+, allows users to video chat directly with their followers within the online network. Brands are already using this functionality in exciting ways: sharing exclusive content, announcing new initiatives, and even hosting video customer service sessions.

One beloved entertainment brand that has used Google Hangouts to reach out to fans is The Muppets. Kermit and Miss Piggy, along with actor-director Jason Segel, sat in front of a webcam and answered questions about their new movie, Disney’s The Muppets. (Sample quote: Miss Piggy summarizes the movie by saying, “It’s all about moi!”) Watch the Muppet Google+ Hangout highlight reel, embedded below:

While its launch and optimization has attracted a lot of press, Google+ is still more of a niche social network when compared to a behemoth like Facebook. This smaller, less diverse user base both has both positive and negative consequences for marketers.

Google+ currently has 40 million users, a MINUS when compared to Facebook’s 800 million. Yet Google+ is growing in popularity among young, tech-savvy American males, a PLUS for business seeking to attract the attention of this market in particular.

Additionally, as Crispin Sheridan of Clickz points out, the nascent Google+ is a “less noisy” atmosphere than Facebook, an even more crowded place thanks to the partnership with music sharing site Spotify and the increasing prevalence of social gaming. A less cluttered network, Google+ gives brands the opportunity to avoid the clutter and achieve “a much more direct and personal relationship with their audiences.”

Finally, the lack of shortened URLs for Google+ pages is a clear MINUS, in our opinion. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Google+ page URLs are made up of a long string of numbers, as opposed to a short alias (for example, facebook.com/webermedia). Some third party sites have shared work-arounds via URL shortening, but they are not ideal. No word yet on if or when Google will introduce these user-friendly “vanity URL.”

Overall, we think the “pluses” of Google+ outweigh the “minuses.” We are excited to experiment with and learn more about Google’s new tool, and we hope you’ll join us there. As always, if you need any assistance with Google+ or any aspect of your social media marketing, we are eager to help guide you. Contact us at info@webermediapartners.com for more information, and share your questions and insights in the comments or via Facebook, Twitter and, of course, Google+.

Whether you use Facebook for personal reasons or as a business tool, you have probably noticed a lot of changes on the site since last Thursday, when founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled them. (NOTES and WARNING: This is 1 hour and 40 minutes long. Fast forward to minute 7.5 if you want to avoid the stand up comedian pretending to be Zuckerberg).

There has been an uproar from some users, but there always is. Change is hard for some, but it is inevitable, especially if Facebook wants to remain in the top spot as a social networking destination.

User complaints abound.

“Too cluttered and overwhelming”
“Stop trying to keep up with/be like Twitter and Google+”
“Don’t try to tell me what I like”
“I liked it the way it was, stop changing.”

Facebook tells us that the changes to personal pages are so you don’t miss recent news that is important to you and that you may have missed since you last logged in as well as flexibility to hide news you don’t want to see using filters.

Upates include:
Real Time News Ticker (think Twitter) at the top right of the page
Bigger photos on your wall
Friend filters
Subscribe Button
(Mashable’s article gives all of the details and video)

THE IMPACT ON YOUR BRAND
So, What does that mean for your brand on Facebook?

SUBSCRIBE is like FOLLOWING on Twitter: Individuals can now follow other individuals (Facebook says “subscribe”) so any public content on a personal Facebook  can be in your news feed. This means that your CEO or other thought leaders within your company can share their ideas (blog posts, links to articles) with their subscribers. Getting subscribers is like getting followers on Twitter- the more of your friends that follow someone, the more of their friends might. Building a following on Facebook can reach a more mainstream audience in a more consumer/personal forum.

FILTERS make it easier for users to qualify the content they receive, making it easier to unsubscribe (while still being a friend), moving their content to more visible or hiding it all together. This means that organizations must be ever more conscious what they are posting to their subscribers so they don’t lose them. Use a litmus of 1) is it helpful? 2) is it informative? or is it 3) sales?  If you or your thought leaders provide subscribers with helpful industry information, you will gain more.  If you sell to them, you will lose your audience.

More updates are coming in a few weeks including:

• A completely redesigned Profile page
• A Timeline (think: this is your life flashing before your eyes)
• Integration with Music and other Media (rumors about about a partnership with Netflix, for instance) using Open Graph

Last words
While many of the new changes are making your experience more custom and allow users to hide what they don’t want to see,  we know that these updates are motivated by the compelling  functionality that Twitter and Google+ provide.  While they currently have smaller audiences, they had the luxury of learning from Facebook before they launched their networks.  Google has launched a fully open Google+, which provides flexibility and simplicity and, having learned what Facebook did not offer, at least initially, it offers much, much more. Read this for the details. Therefore, many things have been bolted on to the Facebook experience that weren’t even a glimmer in Mr. Zuckerberg’s eye when he created the original Harvard-centric tool.

At Weber Media Partners, we love info graphics. This one is so interesting we are going to post it even thought it is enormous. Thank you to Focus.com for putting this together.

In the last of our three-part series on the role of social media in Egypt’s ongoing revolution, we speak directly with Amr Abouelleil, who is one of the growing number of international Egyptian Youth Movement members.

Abouelleil is a 36 year-old Egyptian-American writer and bioinformatics analyst living in Massachusetts with his family. He lived  his early life in Egypt, and  returns every year to visit family, including a female cousin who is active in the revolution. His most recent trip was this past April, where he witnessed the effects of Egypt’s revolutionary activity first-hand.

His take: social media has been the cornerstone of communications during the revolution. Without social media, access to factual information would be limited, and more than likely colored by government spin and propaganda. It has enabled international supporters like Abouelleil to connect first-hand with other Egyptians, and to reach out to a broader audience to both gain support for the revolution and address the misinformation that abounds in traditional media and on the internet.

We hope you find yourself as inspired as we have been by the power of social media, and the strength and passion of those using it to build a better future for their country.

Impressions Through Media: How did you get involved with Egypt’s Youth Movement?

Amr Abouelleil: I’m young, and I was moved by the events in Egypt, so I wanted to do something from here. I joined the Khaled Said group on Facebook, and soon found my cousin posting updates from the protests she attended in Egypt. I asked what we could do from here, and she told me we should just keep getting the word out, that seeing Egyptians backing them all over the world was bolstering the spirits of those sitting-in in Tahrir.

Mostly the things I did were things I think anyone who cared would have done. I attended rallies, I donated money, I reached out to media and government, I pushed back against what I saw as misinformation, and I tried to influence the discussion happening on Facebook because I felt that meant the difference between someone staying home and remaining silent or going down to Tahrir and being heard.

ITM: There seems to be an increasing number of military arrests of civilian protesters (some reports say 49 in Tahrir alone on 6/28-6/29); protesters are being detained in military jails and subjected to military investigations/trials. How did Egyptians use social media to report on these events?

AA: There has been quite a response on the social networks. My cousin took pictures of this particular incident as she was there. She used Twitter to share them. You may see them here.

She says that the army and police continue to try and characterize the protesters as ‘baltagy’, or thugs, yet the ones that are behaving as such are the police and army themselves.

This leads me to some thoughts I hadn’t mentioned to you before. The power of the social network as a mobilization tool is that it personalizes things. In this aspect, it is actually more powerful than traditional news networks. When your family member is so close the danger, and his or her friends are being beaten by police, you care a lot more about taking action than if you are told a story by an anchorman or anchorwoman about a stranger being beaten.

ITM: When we last spoke, you said “When Tunisia happened, it gave people hope, and they lost their fear. I don’t think the people organizing this revolution are afraid anymore.” Do you still believe this statement to be true in light of the recent violent clashes between the police and civilian protestors? Do you think recent events may discourage future action by supporters, or do you feel this was expected by protesters and a risk they were aware of?

AA: To the contrary, I have seen more Egypt-specific activity on pages like “We are all Khaled Said” since [the June 28^th clashes]. During the revolution, the government’s response to protest only led to even more vociferous protest. Whether people are protesting in the streets or online, the response to repression is the same.

Sadly, autocracies in the middle-east seem to be following the same self-destructive playbook. They respond to peaceful protest with violent repression, thereby propagating the very thing they are trying to suppress: more protests.

So yes, I think protesters are keenly aware of the danger, and they believe the risk is worth taking.

ITM: A great deal of attention is being drawn to Syria and Libya in recent weeks, as the respective regimes continue to cut a bloody swathe through the countries’ youth and civilians. The Syrian and Libyan people appear to be embracing the example set by the Egyptian people and taking to the streets in their own protests. Are you and other tech-savvy members of the Youth Movement planning to lend your online voices to their cause as well?

AA: I definitely saw the voices of the Egyptian movement lend support to other causes, especially that of neighboring Libya. I read on Facebook about people taking supplies to the Libyan border, and saw photos of aid convoys. I recall one person asking me online how long it took to get from Cairo to the Libyan border, because they had a loved-one who’d travelled to Egypt with the intent to go to the border and lend assistance. There were protests at the Libyan embassy in Cairo as well, and protests organized in the USA. I haven’t seen as much on Syria.

There has definitely been a lot of information posted in the We Are Khaled Said group, and as I catch up on the latest news, there was a rally being organized in front of the White House on July 23^rd. People are using Facebook to organize, but what impresses me most is the way revolutionaries are using YouTube to move people’s emotions. I can’t tell you how emotional I got watching calls to action in movie form during the 18 days of Egypt’s revolution. The protest movements have the right formula; if you want to move people’s feet, move their emotions.

Syrian revolutionaries are following the example, as you mentioned, and using YouTube to target particular audiences. Here is a video aimed at Americans to encourage attendance at the July 23^rd protest. This video shows just how sophisticated the film-maker is in understanding how to move an American audience. I was left quite impressed.

ITM: You have said your female cousin is very involved in the revolution. Do you think social media has leveled the gender playing field, so to speak, and given women a louder and more equal voice than they may have had otherwise?

AA: I think that it has, to some extent, but the West does tend to over-simplify the situation of women in the Middle-East. They assume that all women wearing hijab had it forced on them, yet I’d heard women say that they felt the hijab made men treat them with more respect because they weren’t viewing them as sex objects. I and many Muslims, both men and women, view hijab as a choice for women, not a tool of oppression; yes, sometimes it is used as a tool of oppression, but that, in my experience, has been the exception, not the rule.

But yes, I think Facebook has allowed women to form women’s rights groups online. Women of Egypt is one example.

For me, the most iconic photos of this revolution are of women in defiance. Women are very much at the heart of this revolution, and it upsets me when Westerners say otherwise. You can find more at the Women of Egypt Facebook page.

ITM: You said when we last spoke that there is a lot of misinformation on the web, perpetuated by the bigoted, uninformed, and the Egyptian government, and that the youth movement strives to be truthful and accurate in its media campaign. Do you feel you are having success with this? How successful do you feel you would have been without the internet and social media?

I did feel like I had some success with this, to some extent. One of the places, aside from Facebook, that I spent a lot of time on was the Huffington Post. I very often scanned the comments of the stories posted on Egypt, looking for misinformation or bigoted comments. I would then counter them, and more often than not, I’d find people thanking me for my perspective. The concern is that these are people who probably agreed with me anyway.

There were individuals who seemed very set in their ways. I think the attitude might be “who is this poster that I should change my mind or believe what he says.” So it is one of the reasons I look toward more conventional outlets. Going through the process to break into publishing lends credibility to the words one writes or says.

ITM: What Facebook groups/accounts and Twitter feeds would you suggest to those wanting to become more aware of or involved in the revolutionary movements?

AA: On Facebook:

We are all Khaled Said

Egyptian Association for Change – USA National Assembly for Change

Women of Egypt

Mohamed El-Baradei (all Arabic)

Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/sandmonkey

http://twitter.com/#!/ghonim

I’m also going to include some YouTube movies here because its involvement should be noted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThvBJMzmSZI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBtYLBQPRGQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HGfFyqJMrk

(Ed. note: we would also like to mention Gigi Ibrahim’s photo stream on Flickr, which is the source of thousands of incredible photos of the events and effects of Egypt’s revolution, and the struggle that continues there while a new government is built.)

ITM: Any message to the people of Egypt and all supporters of the revolution? To those fighting for justice and human rights both there and elsewhere in the world?

AA: Yes. Decades of dictatorship cannot be swept away in eighteen days. The revolution’s just begun.

Photo credit: Gigi Ibrahim via Flickr

Two Can Play at this Game: World Governments’ Responses to Social Media as a Revolutionary Tool

In the first part of this series, we explored how social media enabled and facilitated Egypt and Tunisia’s revolutions. By using Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their beliefs, find like-minded individuals the world over, and organize protests in near real-time, the revolutionaries were able to stay one step ahead of their governments. But now, it seems, the governments are catching up.

In Egypt, segments of the government and army are now on Facebook, using it as a means to spread their own propaganda and to keep an eye on known activist communities. At one point during the revolution, the Egyptian government even shut down internet access, fully aware of the threat it posed to the government. Amr Abouelleil, an Egyptian-American bioinformatics analyst and writer who is actively involved with the Egyptian Youth Movement at the heart of the revolution, says the government was aware that without the internet, people would have to turn to state television (which is government-censored) for their news. The government used this opportunity to up their ante, broadcasting pro-government programming to the unwired masses, which in many cases, appeared to work. “The government got some people to change their tune in just a matter of days,” Abouelleil says. “It brainwashed them to go back on Facebook in the government’s favor instead.”

Egypt is not the only government in fear of the power social media and the internet provides its people; China recently came under fire when Google reportedly foiled an alleged Chinese attempt at stealing the passwords to hundreds of Google accounts, including those of government officials, Chinese human rights activists, and journalists. The Chinese government has since denied involvement, but is well known for their censorship of the internet and television. Whether or not the government is responsible for the hacking attempt, it’s safe to say that they are well aware of the power of the internet and social media, and doing all they can to control it.

Government reactions to the use of Google and social media have been so extreme in recent months that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has said he fears for the safety of Google employees in certain parts of the world. “There are countries where it is illegal to do things that Google encourages. In those countries, there is a real possibility of (employees) being put in prison for reasons which are not their fault,” Schmidt told attendees of Google’s Dublin summit on militant violence this past Monday, June 27.

A prime example of this is Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google executive who is now one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2011. Ghonim was held captive by the Egyptian government for eleven days in early 2011 due to his involvement in using Facebook to organize protests via a page called “We are all Khaled Saeed,” which exposed and raised awareness of the military’s cruel and inhumane murder of Khaled Saeed.

Saeed was a 28 year-old Egyptian resident who was arrested by Egyptian police at an outdoor café and then publicly beaten to death in so brutal a fashion that he was nearly unrecognizable after. “We are all Khaled Saeed” quickly became Egypt’s biggest dissident Facebook page, and the pressure it put on the government was so intense that the government ultimately agreed to put the two arresting officers on trial. The trial, scheduled to end yesterday, June 30, was just postponed for the second time. A verdict is now expected to be announced in September.

Scott Shane, in an article for The New York Times, reinforces Schmidt’s fears, saying that governments’ increasing awareness of the role of social media in revolution is, in fact, causing them to begin mining the internet for revolutionary stirrings and getting a leg up on the revolutionaries. He says that in Belarus, K.G.B. officers now routinely troll activists’ comments on Facebook and will use them as evidence or intelligence in and for interrogations. He cites Alexander Lukashuk, director of the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as saying how a Belarusian photojournalist was recently caught at home in the morning and interrogated by the K.G.B. after she had written that the K.G.B. usually conducted their searches at night.

Syrian activist Ahed al-Hindi tells Shane that “Facebook is a great database for the government now.” He believes that while Facebook is doing “more good than harm,” it does allow oppressors a window into activists’ plans and activities. As Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International says, “[social media] can be used to promote human rights or to undermine human rights.”

As long as revolutionaries are aware of this, we believe that social media will continue to help mobilize change. In Egypt, they are already making contingencies for the government’s monitoring of the Web, and in some cases, going “old-school,” as Abouelleil calls it. In late January, an anonymous 26-page leaflet was circulated among protestors in Cairo providing practical and tactical advice for mass demonstrations, dealing with riot police, and laying siege to and taking control of government offices. The leaflet instructed that it only be passed on by email and photocopy, but not by Facebook and Twitter, as they believed them to be monitored by the government.

Despite the growing awareness by governments on the use of social media as a revolutionary tool, we have little doubt that, with a little craftiness, activists will continue to use it as a means to organize protests and let their voices be heard. As Abouelleil says, “When Tunisia happened, it gave people hope, and they lost their fear. I don’t think the people organizing this revolution are afraid anymore. They don’t care if the government knows; of course they know, but what are they going to do? There are a million people there.” And as the message continues to go out via social media, more people join the cause every day.

For more on social media and the revolution in Egypt, check back next week for the third and last installment in this series, where we’ll speak further with Amr Abouelleil and get his insider’s view as to just how social media was used in Egypt’s revolution, what Egyptians and Egyptian-Americans thought of it, and what’s to come as the country begins to rebuild.

Image: Gigi Ibrahim via Flickr 

Read Part Three: An Interview with Amr Abouelleil

For hundreds of years now, the printed word has given a voice to the people. It has enabled repressed religious groups to establish their freedom and independence, and allowed fledgling countries to organize the support and manpower needed to break free from their oppressive overlords. There are centuries of evidence that the pen is indeed “mightier than the sword;” but in our age of technology, it appears that the Tweet may be mightier than the pen.

We all know by now about the recent social-media fueled upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia; protestors took to the web to voice their views and organize protests, acts which ultimately led to a successful revolution. Social media has given people a larger, louder voice than ever before. It allows them to reach the like-minded in both their own country and across the world. And perhaps more importantly, they are able to do it INSTANTLY. Revolutions that would have taken 10, 20, 30 years in the days before social media can now occur in that many months. Protests that would have taken weeks or months to organize can now happen in hours.

Let’s take a look at historical past revolutions. The Protestant Reformation, for example, would never have been made possible without the invention of the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention allowed Reformation leader Martin Luther to write and publish his beliefs prolifically, without Church censorship, and to distribute them to his followers and like-minded individuals, thus thrusting the reformation to the forefront of the public consciousness. Within 6 years, half of the printed works in Germany were written by Luther.

Then there is the American Revolution. Without Benjamin Franklin’s postal service, would missives have had such wide-spread reach? An organized means of distributing written information was essential to the fledgling colonies breaking free of British rule, and again in establishing the United States as a nation.

So we can see that the printed word has long played a role in disseminating information about dissidence and revolution to the people of the world and inciting the public to action. The difference between then and now is that now the people have the ability to instantly act on that information and reach a global audience.

It is important to note that, contrary to what the media and some extreme social media advocates are saying, the recent uprisings were not, in fact, “caused” by social media. They were caused by political unrest, government and military abuses of power, and poor treatment of a country’s citizens, and those citizens being unwilling to stand for it. The revolutions were, however, enabled and facilitated by social media, and quite possibly might not have been successful without it.

Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we post parts two and three in this series, where we’ll explore the government’s reaction to social media’s involvement in the Egyptian revolution, and speak with an Egyptian-American who has been active in using social media to advance the revolution from his home in the United States. And as always, we welcome your opinions and comments on this post and the topics it covers!

*UPDATE*

Part 2 is now up. Two Can Play at this Game: World Governments’ Responses to Social Media as a Revolutionary Tool

Image: Gigi Ibrahim via Flickr

2011 is nearing its halfway point, and we’ve already seen some dramatic changes in the social media world. The tablet war is heating up, social shopping has become big business, and just this week, Microsoft announced the purchase of Skype for a whopping $8.5 billion. 2011 has also been a big year for Facebook, with its still-growing user base and the increasing promience of “find us on Facebook” messaging in ads from everything from Nissan cars to Energizer batteries to Macy’s Deparment stores to Fancy Feast cat food.

Facebook has also made several key changes to its site in the first half of 2011. We detail these changes below, discuss what these changes mean for Facebook and it users, and look forward to changes that are reportedly in the works for the rest of 2011.

Instant Comments

In 2011, Facebook made it even easier for friends and fans to share their comments. In March, Facebook removed the “comment” button, previously the last step in the commenting process. Instead of a button,  users simply need to press ”enter,” and the post appears in the news feed.

This change is more than just about ease-of-use, however. This faster submit process is a signal of the primacy of data in the Facebook ecosystem.

Facebook’s astronomically high value (currently projected at $50 billion) is largely due to its ability to foster countless, continuous conversations among its over half a billion members. Every company wants to the know what the world thinks of its new product – Facebook is the closest we’ve come to developing a way to do just that.

By making comments that much easier to submit, Facebook is in effect generating more and more data to add to its arensal. The comment button provided users with a prompt to review their content before submitting it. By replacing it with a keystroke,  Facebook has in effect moved sharing into the composition process. A click requires a shift in focus from the keys to the cursor. ”Enter” is just another keystroke. Only this keystroke just happens to publish your thoughts to the world.

How can all of this derive from just one missing button? When you are dealing with a worldwide network the size of Facebook, one change can impact how the world shares information.

The New Business Page

Back in December 2010, Facebook unveiled its new profile page layout, which featured a new “about me” section, thumbnails of recent photos and improved navigation. In February, this new layout extended to Facebook business pages. No doubt all of you who are business page administrators remember this shift, and, like us, you are probably still finding new ways to optimize within this new design (shown below).

Our key conclusion? Images are increasingly important in this new layout. That means that brands should make an effort to add new, relevant photos to their pages on a regular basis, in order to give it a fresh look. You can also custom-design images to appear in these five slots. For example, Best Buy displays five images that display its services and reinforce its brand imagery, while iTunes highlights popular new releases. For a step-by-step guide on how to create and manage a custom photo ribbon, see this detailed post from Laura at Blogging Bistro.

We encourage you to experiment with this image preview feature, with one caveat. Since they have such prime placement on your page, these images should always be relevant, appropriate and consistent with your company’s message.

Facebook Deals

Look out Groupon and LivingSocial, Facebook’s long-awaited local deals site is here! Facebook Deals first appeared in late 2010 as a part of Facebook’s Places, the site’s first foray into location-aware activity. In April, Facebook unveiled an updated Deals program, shifting its focus from Foursquare-like loyalty points to Groupon-style, limited-time local deals. The program is only operating in five “test” cities (Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco), but there are plans to extend it to other cities later this year.

What does Facebook Deals mean for your business? First, it offers you a way to seemingly integrate your “daily deals” with your current Facebook business page (see example here), and market your deal to your target markets with speed, precision and cost-efficiency. For more details, check out Facebook’s business guide.

More broadly, Deals signals Facebook’s plans to promote Facebook Credits. In addition to paying with a credit card, Deals can be purchases using these credits, which act as a ”virtual currency.” (Facebook credits are already playing a role in Facebook-specific games like Zynga’s ubiquitous FarmVille.) Similar virtual currencies have taken off within popular social networks in Asia, and Facebook hopes that U.S. consumers will adopt them in large numbers within the next couple of years.

Why does Facebook care about developing its own currency? They care because if it takes off, it means a lot more money for Facebook! Experts predict that Facebook will make up to $300 million in revenue from Credits in 2011. The biggest current source of Credit revenue is gaming – Facebook takes a 30% cut from game developers for every Credits transaction. Facebook has yet to release information regarding its revenues from Deals, but you can be certain that a similar revenue split is in the works. In the end, the expansion of the Deals platform could introduce a large number of new users to the Credits system.

Looking Ahead

Facebook’s upcoming changes are highly anticipated events that are also closely-held secrets. As such, we in the social media marketing world speculate as to Facebook’s next big thing, all the while knowing that the proof will only come when Facebook decides to make it public.

So what are our best guesses as to Facebook’s future for the rest of 2011 and beyond? We are confident that they will continue to encourage users to share more and more information via increasingly powerful mobile functionality and the continued spread of the “Like” button. We also expect to see Deals expand, and Facebook Credits to slowly make their move into the mainstream. In other words, Facebook will only get bigger in 2012.

What is your reaction to Facebook’s new features? Did you notice the disappearance of the Comment button, and do you miss it? How have you optimized your business page in light of the new layout? Have you tried Facebook Deals, either as a purchaser or a seller? If so, what do you think of it so far? Share this and more in the comments below, or on our (you guessed it) Facebook page.

Facebook is expanding its reach far beyond that of a simple social network. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is taking on the typical shopping experience with Facebook Stores, attacking Groupon with the new Facebook Deals technology and now even surpassing Google for overall web traffic in the U.S. What will be Facebook’s next move in web domination? Some are saying Facebook pages could replace company websites.

One man who strongly advocates for the idea of Facebook superseding company websites is Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook’s U.K branch. Haines, at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference in the U.K, said that customers interact so conveniently with businesses on Facebook that the corporate website could become obsolete. He supported his argument by comparing how many times a company’s Facebook “Like” button was clicked as compared with visits to that company’s website. “For Starbucks, a top Facebook advertiser, the ratio was 21.1 million likes to 1.8 million site visitors. For Coca-Cola, it’s 20.5 million compared with 270,000; for Oreo, 10.1 million compared with 290,000.” While Haines is certainly biased, he is not alone in in his vision for the world’s most far-reaching social network.

According to smallbizlabs.com, a total of 9% of small businesses plan on either eliminating or spending less on their websites because of social media. While Facebook is only a portion of this statistic, the number of business has climbed from only 2% last June, a significant jump in less than a year.

Smallbizlabs.com reports that small businesses are focusing on Facebook as a crucial customer channel. When asked “On which of the following social media networks would you want suppliers to actively participate in (e.g., communicating directly with you)?” Facebook had the highest percentage of businesses with 47 followed by LinkedIn at 37 percent and Twitter at 18 percent. What strikes me most about these findings is that business owners would rather communicate  with their suppliers on Facebook, a social network, as opposed to LinkedIn, a professional network.

Smallbizlabs.com notes a massive jump in businesses wanting to shed or slim down their corporate website in favor of social media and shows that businesses want to do more business on Facebook.  With so may places to promote your brand, it makes sense for small businesses with small budgets to focus on the most populous site. Facebook might have started out as a way for college students to network, it’s turned into a something much, much more.

(with Catherine Weber)

Now that you know all about Quora and how it works, Weber Media Partners gives you three ways that it can help you and your business manage and build its online reputation.

1) Monitoring Your Brand

Quora is a unique way to monitor your brand’s online reputation. The site’s “Account Settings” provide a comprehensive list of options for e-mail notifications. You can choose to receive e-mail messages alerting you to new questions and answers, actions of specific users, and summaries of actions relating to a specific topic. Silicon Valley analyst Jeremiah Owyang recommends tracking brand and product mentions, for it is “likely if one customer is asking questions in Quora, it’s an indicator others are too.”  He further suggests escalating recurring questions or problems to the correct group within the company.

Weber Media Parents agrees, and we would be happy to work with you to develop a Quora monitoring program. We’ll help you identify FAQs, desired product or service changes, potential blog topics, or other industry trends. Contact us for more information.

2) Sharing Your Expertise

You and your colleagues know a lot about your industry – why not share this wealth of wisdom? Since corporate accounts are not possible, companies should instead encourage interested and knowledgeable parties to set up Quora accounts, identify themselves as employees, and comment on questions in their chosen area of expertise. Quora gives employees the opportunity to share valuable information with their contemporaries across the globe, and perhaps even become thought-leaders on a given topic.

These experts can be powerful spokespeople for the company, but they can also cause headaches if they are not given the proper guidelines from the beginning. A meeting among managers and the marketing team to establish ground rules – such as style guides, the discussion of new product details, or non-work-related submissions – is highly recommended before introducing Quora to the social media plan.

3) Responding to Your Customers’ Queries

Quora revolves around questions and answers, making it a powerful customer service channel. Mashable blogger Heather Whaling singles out Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom as one user who is performing this task particularly well on the site. Systrom, who created the popular iPhone photo app, provided in-depth answers to a number of questions about his company. Thanks to his clear authority and knowledge, his responses have shot to the top spot on the pages. By answering his customers’ questions thoroughly and openly, Systrom has both ensured that the correct information is distributed and garnered good will for himself and his company.

The Weber Media team is excited about this newest tool, and we hope you are, too! Share your thoughts on Quora here or via Facebook or Twitter. And please let us know if you have any questions about integrating Quora and social search into your social media marketing program.

It’s 2011, and Quora has emerged as the latest social media tool that has marketers buzzing. The site, which was launched in January 2010 with Facebook’s former Chief Technology Officer serving as co-founder, has already attracted significant attention from the top social media blogs and from venture capitalists. Quora’s innovative “social search” is being touted as “future of blogging“ and “much, much bigger than Twitter.”

Yet what exactly is Quora, and how can it fit into your social media marketing strategy? Weber Media Partners will answer these questions in a two-part series. Today, we will introduce this increasingly popular new search site. On Friday, we’ll take you through the three ways Quora can help your business.

What is Quora?

Let’s start with the basics. Quora defines itself as “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” Users can search the site for specific questions, browse questions by category, or post questions that have yet to be posed by a user. All users can also contribute to the answers, responding themselves or “voting up” their preferred response. Registration is free, and it is easy to connect your Quora account to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, and your blog.

Quora is a powerful tool, but it is not the most user-friendly one. The best way to learn is to practice. After creating your account, start following topics of interest to you. To do this, simply begin typing the topic into the search bar and select from the resulting list. Once you follow a topic, questions relating to the topic will appear in your activity stream (similar to your Twitter stream or Facebook news feed).

The next step after selecting your topics is to post answers or questions of your own. Click on the image at right to see an example of a Quora question and answer page. The answers appear on the page in descending order based on user votes (e.g. “up” votes make an answer rise up the page) and the author’s previous record (e.g. the higher their previous posts, the higher their answers appear).

The Quora team is quick to note that it has protections in place to prevent users from “gaming” the system, and thus negating the accuracy and value of its content. In addition to monitoring its users’ submissions, Quora requires you to use your full name to register. While it encourages users to share titles and employers as a way of verifying the source of the knowledge provided, the site does not permit the establishment of business or brand accounts. Quora has been actively removing accounts that violate this policy, including the blog Mashable‘s account. There are currently no plans to add this feature to Quora.

To learn how this new tool can help your business as part of your social media marketing plan, check back with us on Friday for the second half of our Quora series. And as always, share your thoughts here or via Facebook or Twitter.

While there were so many to report on, the Globe and Mail did a great story on what high profile stories worked and didn’t work last year. Three of the ten: Groupon being offered 6 billion by Google and declining, Old Spice ads getting over 28 million hits on YouTube , The Social Network, a movie about Facebook that depicts a young college students idea coming to life.

All of these were important commentaries on how social media is impacting our culture. Talk a look at the story to see all ten here.

Last week I presented to the SEMNE professional organization in Rocky Hill Connecticut to a room full of search engine optimization experts. In surveying the crowd in advance of delivering this presentation, many attendees wanted to know how social media can help build a website’s inbound links. To explain how this works, I used the following analogy.

How many cereal boxes do you have?

We have all noticed the remarkable variety of cereal types in the grocery store. An entire aisle has been dedicated to only a few cereal companies, who each have dozens of brands on the shelf.  Cereal companies provide this varieties to increase the the amount of shelf space the own, and the likelihood of sell at least one box to each shopper. The aisle is a finite space, and they want as much of that space as possible. It is this same philosophy the SEO expert should consider in leveraging social media. Every employee profile created on Linkedin, the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare accounts, and blog post that mentions the brand, give the company one more item in Google search results. So, like creating another brand of cereal for the aisle, each property is an opportunity to get your brand in front of your customer or prospect. These properties also build an inbound linking program to help raise the quality of the website overall.

Create a Sustainable Content Strategy

It is important to note that setting up these properties is only the beginning. You must have a content strategy that considers your audience and what they are interested in. Your content should be helpful and interesting, not advertising stuffed with key words. This strategy should be sustainable, and relevant to your audience. You should monitor what people are commenting on and sharing, and tweak your content to reflect what you are continually learning from your audience.

Below are my slides from the presentation. Soon I will post the talk itself, with the slides incorporated. Let me know what you think.

While social networking began as a consumer activity, it has become a crucial component of most business marketing strategies as it allows companies to reach highly targeted audiences with custom messaging to build brand awareness and establish a relationship with the customer who now expect companies to be reachable and accountable.

Business Benefits
Businesses are now regularly using tools such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn for hiring, customer support, product development, brand recognition, and, of course, client acquisition and retention. Social media has another benefit: the cost of acquiring customers is significantly lower than placing ads, and creates a lasting relationship.

The benefits of a quality social media marketing program include:

• Transparent, authentic feedback from your audience
• Integrates well with conventional marketing programs
• Reach highly-targeted audiences
• Improves search engines positioning
• Lower cost than advertising
• More long term and wider impact than conventional public relations

Listen first, Act second
Buyers look to objective internet sources to compare business products and services including existing customers who are more than willing to share their experience with these products. Companies can’t control the chatter, but they can learn what customers want.

Brands such as Comcast have made major strides in customer service by listening on Twitter. When their brand is mentioned, they know. When someone has a problem, they help them within minutes. They follow the first rule of social media: listen first, act second. Maintaining a regular monitoring program helps to understand customer sentiment and how it changes as you implement online programs.

Defining Success
Measuring the success of a social media campaign is possible only if you define your targets in advance. Whether they include increased traffic, website conversions or leads, you must have clear targets for successful campaigns, at short-term and long-term time intervals. A few examples of what success might look like include:

• Gaining a better understanding of your customers
• Increase brand exposure in ways which were not possible before
• Reducing costs for achieving the same targets using other marketing tactics
• Increase sales and conversions

Some great resources to compliment this blog post:

Social Commerce, Social Media Today, November 2, 2010

Content for People, Not Robots, Impressions Through Media, September 18, 2010

Last month,  I presented to FastTRack MBA students at Babson College in the Managing Growing Business class about Weber Media Partners’  history, growth and core values. In the five years that I have presented to this class each semester, rarely does any other presenter whom I share the podium talk about their organizational values. Most talk about profit and venture funding and the mechanics of the business.  While I can’t say that values alone will make you profitable, and that having no values will cause you to fail, I can say that they matter to our company.

A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who spoke at Bentley University for American Marketing Association, Boston Chapter as part of his Delivering Happiness book tour.  Tony attributes his company success to developing and staying true to core values.   His slides and audio of his talk (turn your volume up for this) will give you some insight into why Amazon bought Zappos for 1.2 billion dollars in 2009.

The values, relationships and passion he talked about resonated with our business values at Weber Media Partners.  They drive how you communicate with your audience, the business practices you use and your every day communications with your team.   I would love to hear from you about how your company’s core values guide your success.

Weber Media Partners has been working with Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area for nearly 10 years. We have had the pleasure to work with some of the hardest working professional National Park Service staff, who care tremendously about natural resources in this country, and in particular, about the natural history and American history that makes up the many islands in Boston Harbor. When we had the opportunity to work with them on their new website, we were excited, but also knew that it was a highly visible project, with many stakeholders to serve.

We had an amazing team of writers, developers, project managers and designers, all who care passionately for the outcome. We created a site that provides intuitive trip planning for all types of visitors. See the full case study for more details.

We are pleased to say that our hard work has paid off for Boston Harbor Islands, where visitation is up to an all-time high. Superintentent Bruce Jacobson writes in his weekly email:

“We had more visitors to the islands this past spring, summer, and fall season than any other year. More than 100,000 passengers rode the park ferry. Double that number visited locales accessible by car.

Thank you to all who have worked so hard making this season one of the best yet!”

To add to this, Weber Media Partners has been selected as a finalist for a much acclaimed MITX award for this project in the Environmental Consciousness category. We are thrilled to be recognized for our work and look forward to the ceremony on November 18th.

Dianna Huff, DH Communications, presented content marketing at the SEMNE meeting on Wednesday. Her presentation focused on why SEO firms should think like marketers and helping clients create content. See her presentation here.

I was excited to hear another marketing consultant expound on this important issue. The challenge for any business, large or small, with making social media succcessful and keeping it on track is to have a content strategy and have a regular stream of valuable content that speaks to your audience. Some SEO practitioners may be optimizing content, but not actually helping them produce it, when of course, SEO is not just about optimized content, but the continued publishing of optimized content that will actually be useful to your audience. It’s not just about the robots that index your website, it’s about the actual PEOPLE who read it!

We at Weber Media Partners recognized this as the main challenge for SMBs to contend with when they consider doing a social media work- from blogs to twitter to Facebook, if you want to stay in front of you customer, don’t annoy them and don’t be invisible- be helpful and interesting. Companies have the same issues when launching SEO and PPC campaigns.  So, having said this, Dianna gave some great tips, which I agree whole heartedly with:

• Act like a reporter, and investigate your client’s company, products and services
• Immerse yourself in your client’s industry by reading key industry blogs, forums and twitter feeds
• Monitor what is getting published on the internet about your client, their competitors and key words that describe their product using Google alerts or a monitoring tool such as Jive, Radian6 or dozens of other free and fee-based tools (we use Jive)
• Consider ebooks, how-to guides, video, surveys, podcasts, and presentations
• Produce a list of FAQs with all of the questions the company gets asked every day via phone and email to speed up the sales cycle and help clients make a decision
• Develop and publish a comparison chart between your clients products and their competitors

The list is endless what kind of content you create, but it must be valuable and helpful to the audience, not just stuffed with keywords to get positioning. It must serve the purpose of serving the customer. Clients hire SEO consultants to help them get found by their audience. Being found is only the first step. Once they arrive, engaging them is the key.

Next month, I will be speaking at the SEMNE meeting in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The topic: Reaping the benefits of a combined SEO and social media strategy. Stay tuned for more.

Part III of our Best of Back to School marketing campaigns of 2010 dives into the changing world of college textbooks.  In recent years, numerous companies have sprung up offering alternatives to the notoriously expensive college bookstore.  This year, I was particularly impressive by two such companies – Coursesmart and Chegg.

Through its sleek, easy-to-use website, Coursesmart offers an ever-growing selection of “e-textbooks” – electronic versions of the traditional print texts that can be read on desktops, laptops, iPads and even iPhones.  Coursesmart’s e-textbooks give the reader the ability to highlight sections, take notes in the margins, print selected pages and cut and paste selections.  Now there is no need to carry around tons of heavy books – you can keep them all on our laptop, read for easy access with just one click.

I was particularly impressed by Coursesmart’s synergy with Apple products.  Being able to access textbooks from an iPhone is the ultimate in transportable texts.  Furthermore, the iPad opens the door to more interactive and impactful textbooks.  (See image above for an example of a Coursesmart text viewed on a iPad.)  The Wall Street Journal discussed the iPad and Coursesmart’s innovative e-texts in a recent article, stating that the new device makes book publishers “eager to exploit its color, video, and touch-screen capabilities.”  I, for one, would love to test drive this exciting new technology.

Of course, this new technology comes with a big price tag.  Coursesmart’s e-textbooks, while less expensive than print versions, can still run in the $100 range.  And then there’s the iPad, priced at $499 – a very pricey item to pile on top of an already expensive back to school season.  Another textbook innovator, Chegg, combines new and old technology to offer a more affordable alternative.

Chegg is the Netflix of the textbook world: users can rent paper textbooks, and then return them for free via UPS when the semester ends.   (The name is a play on the classic “chicken and the egg” dilemma.)  Chegg touts its used book rental services as both economical and eco-friendly.  Rental prices are often more than 50% off the purchase price – a welcome treat for students and their parents.  On the green side, Chegg promises to plant a tree for every book rented.

I love Chegg’s merger of the low tech (sharing books) and the high tech (fast, searchable, easy-to-use website).  This year, Chegg has launched two more ways to take advantage of its service – a new iPhone app that allows users to rent books via their phone, and a pilot program of rental stands in college bookstores that brings the “rental experience” onto campus.

Finally, Chegg is running a fun promotion this season called Golden Chegg.  Rent books now thorough September 13^th, and you are entered to win one of thousands of prizes.  The winners are tracked on Chegg’s Facebook page.  Saving money and winning prizes?  Sign me up!

I hope you have enjoyed this survey of the best of Back to School.  Do you have any innovative, fun and important campaigns to add to the list?  Share them here or on Weber Media’s Facebook page.  Happy shopping, and to all fellow students, I wish you good luck this school year!

On Wednesday, I kicked off my series on the best Back to School marketing campaigns of 2010.  I sought out campaigns that are innovative, fun and helpful, both to the shopper and the community at large.  In Part II of the series, I will highlight Target’s innovative and extremely useful “Roomates” Facebook app.

Target is a popular destination for college students stocking up on dorm necessities.  To help ensure these coeds get everything they need, Target has developed an interactive checklist accessible via Facebook.  The checklist has three options (“buy,” “have” and “pass”), and includes links to purchase specific products on Target.com.

The best part about this campaign, however, is the roommates option.  This part of the app allows students to share their list with their roommate(s), helping ensure that one suite will not wind up with four vacuums and only one lamp.  The app also features messaging, calendars, and even a bill splitter – definitely something I wish I had in college.

Once the checklist is complete, students can select the print option and bring the list along on their shopping trip.  The checklist is even available on Target.com in a more traditional PDF format.  All in all, this campaign is a helpful tool for college students, as well as an ingenious way to show off the megastore’s seemingly innumerable product offerings.

Stop by our blog on Monday for the conclusion of this series, in which I discuss two innovative and cost-effective alternatives to the traditional college bookstore.

Two weeks ago, a milestone was reached: I received my first school-related e-mail message.  It opened with a jolly greeting from my professor, and moved quickly to talk of future assignments and course requirements.  That’s when it hit me – I need to get ready for back to school!

As a grad student, I’ve done the Back to School ritual more times then I’d care to count.  So, to liven up the hunt this year, I’ve added an additional item to my usual list of notebooks, highlighters and (of course) new shoes – find my favorite Back to School marketing campaigns.  I sought out campaigns that are innovative, fun and helpful, both to the shopper and the community at large.  A lucky few made it to the top of the class, and I will detail those campaigns in a series of three posts.  Today, I will profile Staples’ philanthropy.

Students and parents browsing the aisles (or web site pages) of this office superstore for back to school necessities can do more than just buy – they can give back, too.  For the third year in a row, Staples has partnered with teen-centric non-profit DoSomething.org to collect school supplies for children in need.  Donation bins have been set up in Staples retail locations across the country, and school supplies of all kinds will be collected now through September 18^th.

This year, Staples used Facebook and a celeb-filled online game to help students get involved.  Teen can vote to join their favorite celebrity’s “pack,” and in the process donate $1 to the cause.  Donations are also accepted via text message.

All in all, I loved Staples’ idea and its execution.  These simple donations are a great way to teach everyone from preschoolers to high schoolers the importance of generosity and kindness towards those who are less fortunate.  Furthermore, through their Do Something 101 microsite, they provide helpful tips that help students run their own school supply drives – the lesson being that teens can really “do something” big to help their communities.

Judging by the 28,000 Facebook fans and thousands of votes on the contest page, this event is a proving to be a success.  Even Staples’ archrival Dunder Mifflin is getting in on the action!  With that endorsement secured, I now know where I’ll be purchasing my paper…

I hope you have enjoyed this first installment of my survey of the best of Back to School.  Be sure to visit our blog soon to see who else made the list!

In 2008, David Meerman Scott drew comparisons between social marketing and the Grateful Dead at the the first Inbound Marketing Conference in Massachusetts. Having seen dozens of Dead shows, my first in 1982, I immediately understood what he was talking about.

This band did everything differently– they produced only 13 albums over 30 years but instead toured constantly, doing more than 2300 shows. They played different songs every night from their catalog of 500 and supported the fans need for live shows by letting them record from a special section in the audience. Their brand lives on more than 15 years after Jerry Garcia’s death, and new fans are discovering them even now.

So, when I heard that David and Brian Halligan of Hubspot had written “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History”, I knew I needed to review it here. It covers how the Dead did the marketing basics differently: Their unique brand, message and offering, their fans(customers), and finally, their business model and operations. It’s a perfect guide for CEOs and marketers to learn to think differently and  create a break through brand.

I like it’s size and structure, small and easy to digest, but with a lot of good concepts that will make sense to marketers. There are also great examples of businesses that succeeded using some of these principles.  If you don’t know much about the Grateful Dead, this material will help you to understand them and why they were the most successful touring band in history.  To learn more, visit the Facebook Fan page.

As a result of reading this great book, I am considering how Weber Media Partners can better grow our fans, one at a time, by listening and collaborating with our clients to deliver the most innovative and effective marketing programs. Read the book and maybe you will too.

Oh, and, take some time to listen to the music. It’s just that good.

Twenty years ago, our friend Dan did meticulous research on lawnmowers, comparing price and quality, reading Consumer Reports, and talking to various salesmen, asking questions at local stores. Once he decided which brand and model to buy, we piggybacked on his research and bought the same one because we knew he did a thorough evaluation.

While influence is nothing new, the many ways we’re influenced is, in more and more ways.  If you consider all of the consumer buying decisions we make: where we shop and dine out, which movies we see and what music we listen to, we have always made decisions with influence from our family, our friends, and, even perfect strangers.

Now, in addition to in-person influence, we are often influenced by a virtual community made up of people that we know, and their friends, many who post their opinions on Facebook, by liking a page, or on Amazon, by reviewing a product, or on Yelp, by reviewing a restaurant or local business.  (Yelp, by the way, got in trouble with site users for manipulating reviews in favor of advertisers and has changed their policy based on widespread negative feedback.)

That’s why Facebook has been making it easy for companies to incorporate the Like widget on their websites and blogs. Everything you “like” is cataloged for all of your Facebook friends to see.

This summer, my family decided to take a road trip, and I started using Foursquare, which posts my visits to restaurants and hotels, as well as my review of the experience.  Location-based social influence is in its early stages with the general public, but growing.

Recently, Google has started incorporating reviews into search results. Rather than navigating to a review site, google delivers the reviews,  saving the user clicks, and keeping them on their site.

Businesses who understand how to harness their own customers’ influence can make the leap from a few testimonials on a their About page, to a fan club spread across the web, where ever their customers and potential customers might be found.

This week I’ve had some interesting conversations with clients about their social media strategy.

During a discussion on  blogging, one of our clients pointed out that everything they see on blogs is BORING, longwinded, and is more like stream of consciousness thoughts vs. useful information.

If you Google “Why Blogs Fail”, you will get more than 89 million links to articles, many of them blog posts to this very topic.  The reason blogs fail is not a secret, and some statistics claim  that 95% of them do.

• Blogs fail because the organization has not made a real commitment to resources
• Blogs fail because there is no clear content strategy
• Blogs fail because the author doesn’t know if anyone is listening

What is considered blog success?
If your blog

• contributes something of value and demonstrates your expertise regularly (at least once per week)
• set you apart from your competition
• has visitors who read your content (how many depends on what share of the audience you want)
• gets comments and starts conversations

you can feel pretty good that your blog is going in the right direction.

That is why we always help our clients create a blog strategy first that clearly articulates:

1. the objectives for the blog
2. who the audience is and what content do they care about
3. who is going to manage, write and moderate
4. an editorial calendar for 6 months to a year
5. where story ideas will come from
6. set up a process for moderation and approvals
7. set up analytics to track traffic

While corporations make a financial commitment to many types of marketing programs, blogging isn’t often give the same respect. I suspect this is mainly because we need to demonstrate measurable value on par with other programs.

Positioning Blog Value

Blogs demonstrate your thought leadership and increase traffic from organic search. Traffic from organic search can be transformed into qualified leads with the right offers and landing pages.  If you are struggling to get management support and budget to start and maintain a blog, it may be wise to bundle it with other, more conventional lead generation and SEO programs which are more widely understood and supported.

So, rather than think of white papers to present thought leadership and case study PDFs,  think blogs, videos and ebooks.  More on video and ebooks soon.

Last week I wrote a post about MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook which included eighteen lessons I learned from the report.

This is a true story. Yesterday morning I met a friend for coffee. She’s owned and operated a business in the design industry for many years where she’s worked with both B2B and B2C customers, and lately has grown more curious about social marketing.

My friend told me that she’s always been an early adopter of technology and has even been a little surprised that she hasn’t considered social marketing earlier. Like so many other business people, she hasn’t known where to begin.

It wasn’t until driving back to my office after the hour we spent together that I realized I had used the ROAD map as a way to walk her through the basics of social marketing. As a refresher, MarketingSherpa identified ROAD as Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

Here’s how we approached the topic together for her first time:

Research: My friend told me that she reads a number of blogs in the creative design industry and has for some time. There are blogs she’s come across which she thinks are excellent and others that in her opinion, don’t provide any value. This is a great first step and I suggested that she take it  further by trying to identify what she thinks are good about those blogs. What could she emulate in her own blog if she were to start one? What would be the topics and focus? What content would best demonstrate her firm’s expertise? What would set her company apart from others? Ongoing research of blogs and other social media channels will be an important part of the process.

Objectives: Like any marketing efforts, social marketing needs a list of identifiable objectives you’re hoping to achieve. My friend explained that her business uses their website and photographs to help show prospective clients the work they do. So why would they need more? Social marketing content could drive traffic to their website. It can help get the company name and their services out in front of people on a frequent and regular basis. With social media marketing a company’s values and personality can be readily  communicated. In this step my friend needs to identify what she hopes to get out of social media marketing for her business. Coming up with objectives will help her to undertake social media marketing efforts for the right reasons. It will also give her company a meaningful way to stay in touch with existing customers.

Actions: MarketingSherpa defines actions as a tactical plan that will show you how to get there from here. In my friend’s case, she is at the very beginning of an exploratory phase. She won’t be able to implement a social media plan until she understands more about social marketing and the implications for her business. Like many other business people the decision whether to take on social marketing isn’t a unilateral decision. Her first steps will be to talk with others in her firm about what she’s learned so far. The question of how to manage and fund social marketing initiatives will most likely be a key part of the discussion. The conversation won’t happen or be resolved overnight. It will take time. In fact, actions may involve taking one step forward and two steps back. And that might happen a few times along the ROAD.

Devices: This is where my friend and her colleagues need to identify which social media channels would make the most sense for the business (assuming that’s the direction they choose to go). Social media marketing isn’t a one-size fits all proposition. They will need to think about whether written blog posts are what their audience will respond to. Or perhaps Facebook updates with links to events and posts. Will tweets work with Facebook, or could they stand on their own? Would the business benefit from having a presence on Flickr or YouTube? These are all considerations. By talking through the various channels and learning more about them by going to different companies pages they will be able to make more informed decisions about social media channels. As MarketingSherpa suggests the “number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that supports your tactical plan of action.”

I’ll be interested to follow her companies’ discovery process. What about you? Where are you on the social marketing ROAD? What key lessons have you learned along the way?

image credit: jurvetson’s photostream

Whether this population is called: Millennial; Gen Y; EchoBoomer; Net, Boomerang or Peter Pan Generation–see what’s important to them, how they view technology, news, TV and Internet.

Infographic Source: Ethan Bloch, Flowtown.

Earlier this week I spoke on a panel of social media professionals to 70 executive directors and marketing staff of nonprofit organizations at Simmons College in Boston. The subject was Social Media: Tips and tools for using social media to build support for your mission. The event was organized by the Center for Non-profit Success.

We had a great group of panelists who provided a balance of tools, case studies and strategy. My task was to present on strategy.   While everyone had a Facebook presence, only two or three audience members had a strategy to back up their social media activities. This is common amongst most nonprofits and many for-profits.  Unfortunately, without a strategy in place, these organizations may not be creating content that serves their audience, delivers on their organizational objectives or have the triggers in place to understand how successful their programs are.

The great news is that once your strategy is created and you know what you need to do, your daily social media marketing activities are efficient and carry more impact. Having measurements in place is rewarding. Once you know what’s not working, you can eliminate  time spent on them and focus on successful tactics. This is crucial for justifying resource allocation and funding.

The main steps in creating a strategy are:

• Develop objectives for your marketing and social media program
• Conduct a competitive review to hear best practices in your industry
• Profile your audiences and understand their needs and how you can serve them
• Draft a plan that identifies objectives, tactics and measurement strategy for 6 months
• Implement the program and measure it monthly, tweaking as you go.

More resources

My slides

Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report

The title of MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Handbook, Social Marketing ROAD Map, is not only a clever analogy referring to the territory marketers must navigate to map out a social media strategy, the acronym is memorable and quite right-on. ROAD stands for: Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

I know writers are supposed to resist the temptation to use clichés—but I can’t help it—so indulge me here for a moment while I offer you a personal perspective. For me, someone who fears getting lost, my Global Positioning System (GPS) has changed my life with its turn-by-turn voice directions. The ROAD Map Handbook offers the comfort and confidence that I’ve come to rely on from my GPS. I think you too will find great direction from the guidelines, best practices and tactics, templates, suggested resources, worksheets, list of social media platforms, and comprehensive glossary.

Whether you’re a marketer just starting out in Social Media or have been traveling these roads for some time, you’re bound to find many valuable tips and strategies in MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing Road Map Handbook.

You’ll want to read the Handbook yourself to receive the full benefit but to get you started, here are some of my favorite marketing signposts. See if any of the concepts speak to you or challenge how you’ve thought about your social media and search campaigns. (Share your thoughts in the comments.) Also, check-out MarketingSherpa’s upcoming social marketing workshops that begin next week in Boston.

Signpost #1: Include tactics that maintain viral momentum when building social media campaigns.

Signpost #2: Integrate social media with your other online marketing tactics.

Signpost #3: Get on board with integrating Social Media and SEO tactics. Social Media has the potential to greatly improve your search engine campaigns.

Signpost #4: Social content is getting indexed by search engines and generates increased number of listings in search results.

Signpost #5: Social Media’s true benefit to search campaigns is increased clickthrough rates which will bring: increased traffic to your website, leads and online sales, email addresses, and more items added to shopping carts.

Signpost #6: Social Media generates reams of online content which needs to be optimized with targeted keywords.

Signpost #7: A key tenet of Social Media Marketing is to provide value through great content and interaction.

Signpost #8: Add relevant URL’s to social media profiles, e.g. Facebook, twitter.

Signpost #9: SEO keyword research can identify keywords and phrases to use in social media channels to attract more visitors.

Signpost #10: Creating a blog enables you to share your industry expertise with clients while generating massive amounts of keyword-rich content for your domain and search engines.

Signpost #11: Social sharing allows email recipients to share email content on popular social networks and other social media sites.

Signpost #12: Assess and select specific social media brands that will most effectively power the tactics and fit into the social marketing architecture. Lack of architecture results in “random acts of social marketing.” 
Brands include: Social Networks (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn), Microblog (e.g. Twitter), Video sharing (e.g. YouTube), Photo sharing (e.g. Flickr), Presentation sharing (e.g. SlideShare), Document sharing (e.g. Scribd), Social Bookmarking or News (e.g. Digg).

Signpost #13: The number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that supports your tactical plan of action.

Signpost #14: Many of the most successful social marketing architectures have a common structure based on a hub and spoke design.

Signpost #15: A website can be the hub of your overall marketing strategy while a blog is the hub of a social marketing strategy.

Signpost #16: The website offers key touch-points for attracting anonymous visitors and converting them into identifiable leads or customers by offering marketing information needed to make purchase decisions.

Signpost #17: A blog is an important aggregation point for frequently updated content and destination point for inbound links. Blogs are very search engine friendly, usually achieving rankings above a website.

Signpost #18: Social networks, multimedia sharing, and social bookmarking sites serve as spoke sites for the hub by feeding traffic to the hub and enabling the hub to feed traffic back to them for engagement and community building.

Thoughts? Comments?

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to Sergio Balegno, Research Director, MarketingSherpa for providing a review copy of  Social Marketing ROAD Map for this blog post.

Image by JMC Photos via Flickr

It may be early on in the race to Social Media marketing success, but there are already some notable leaders and laggards emerging.  Which industries are the ambling tortoises, and which are the speedy hares?

In this post, we will review the findings of a recent report from intelligence provider Social Media Influence (SMI), and share our own analysis to help you handicap this race to success.

In their June report entitled “The State of Social Media Jobs 2010,” SMI surveyed the marketing departments of all Fortune 100 companies, to find out whether they have in-house social media resources, outsource their social media campaigns, or have little to no investment in social media marketing.

The graph below shows the results of their survey.  The blue line represents the total number of companies in that industry, while the red line represents those companies in that industry that SMI deems “social media-savvy” (i.e. they devote significant in-house resources to social media marketing efforts).  As you can see, the leaders of the group include Tech/Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Retail and Automotive.  On the flip side, the laggards are Petroleum/Energy, Financial Services/Insurance and Utilities.  (Click to enlarge image.)

Based on my experience as a business school student and a professional focusing on the field of social media marketing, this list of early and late adopters conforms to what I expected to see.  Yet I did some digging of my own, both to test this conclusion and to single out companies that typify/contradict this survey data.

Leaders

With all of the coverage detailing how social media is impacting fashion, dining and entertainment, I was not surprised to see retail high on the list of the converted.  Tech/consumer electronics is also an expected leader, given the increasing importance of social features to their gadget-loving consumers.

Yet it was healthcare’s spot on the list that was the biggest surprise for me.  Health-focused social communities like Inspire and PatientsLikeMe have been steadily growing in the last few years, and have been garnering press and academic inquiry along the way.  But who are the social media exemplars from the healthcare industry?

To find out, I surveyed the numerous, renowned hospitals in my hometown of Boston to track and evaluate their social media presence.  I found 14 Boston hospitals with active Facebook pages – and that’s just in the city itself.  These 14 hospitals together attract a total of 168,398 fans as of July 13th.

Particularly striking is Children’s Hospital Boston, a world-renowned hospital whose Facebook page attracts over 150,000 fans.  Their Facebook page features numerous freely-given testimonials from patients and parents, hospital news and awards announcements, links to children’s health articles and videos, and even Spanish-language posts. The hospital, which also has a presence on Twitter and YouTube, is fully embracing social media as an important mode of communication with its patients, their parents, the Boston community and the medical community at large.

Laggards

The SMI report shows that the financial services industry is one of the clear laggards in the social media race, again an unsurprising finding based on my experience.  The name of the game here is regulation.  In the wake of industry upheaval and some headline grabbing scandals, the industry is understandably reluctant to make a big leap into this ever-changing new marketing environment.

In January 2010, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) released guidelines for the use of blogs and social media by financial firms, at the request of the firms.  The 10-page guidelines include rules regarding record keeping, suitability, supervision, training and third-party posts.  (For a summary of the guidelines, listen to this 10-minute podcast from FINRA.)

Tracking the social media forays of financial services firms in light of these new guidelines will be key in 2010.  Based on a brief survey, I found the large players in the industry have begun to engage with social media.  Fidelity Investments and Vanguard both have sizable Facebook followings (over 3,000 fans and over 9,000 fans, respectively).  Unsurprisingly, both pages also feature lengthy disclaimers and detailed posting guidelines.

In contrast to this industry’s slow move into social media, one big player in another social media laggard industry – petroleum/energy – was thrust into the media this year in a very public way.  I am talking of course about BP.

Search Facebook for pages with “BP” in the title, and you get more than 500 results, with names like “Boycott BP,” “I HATE BP,” “Make BP responsible for the Gulf Coast oil spill” and more, some with language we won’t publish here.  In other words, outraged people have inundated social media with protests, boycotts, and other harsh words for the oil company.  There was even a very public battle with a parody Twitter account BPGlobalPR, which is still active and has attracted over 180,000 followers.

In response, BP has created their own Facebook page to “engage the public in an informative conversation and dialogue about [BP’s] efforts associated with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.”  This site, which also links to an official blog, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr accounts, provides updates on the spill and the cleanup on an hourly basis.  The site is full of interactive, detailed information, but its number of followers pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of followers on the anti-BP sites.  Whether BP’s social media efforts will continue in the future is unknown; what is known is that they had to quickly catch up in order to join the social media conversation.

Will BP’s lesson affect its industry’s social media reluctance?  Will the new FINRA guidelines and industry leaders spur more social media interest on the part of the financial services industry?  Will healthcare continue to be a social media innovator?  Whatever the outcome, 2010 will no doubt bring more new developments in the race to achieve success in the ever-changing field of social media marketing.

Now we want to hear from you.  Do you agree with this list?  Do you know of any companies that support or contradict these findings?  Share your thoughts in the comments below, or via Facebook and Twitter.

In the new book, The Yahoo! Style Guide, bloggers are advised to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages.”

I review the analytics for this site on a regular basis and am often intrigued to see the far-reaching range that posts can have. This past month visits came from 47 countries/territories and 23 languages. (Drilling down a little further I could even see that one recent post was picked up and cited on a blog in Brazil and then viewed most heavily in Sao Paulo.)

So what’s a blogger to do?

• You can start by following five best practices from the style guide: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and non-literal usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

• If you’re not tracking where your visitors are coming from, you may be surprised. Check out the Google Analytics tabs for map overlay and languages.

• You can also view a selection of instructional videos about Google Analytics on YouTube. Below is a helpful introduction to get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZZ86NLRS_I

Image by CLUC via Flickr

A new Infographic with facts and visual perspective on the Internet:

Via: Medical Coding Certification

In a new post by Denise Wakeman she suggests repurposing your blog posts into different formats to “get more exposure and more value from the time you’ve initially invested in creating the content. Not to mention that you can drive more traffic back to your home base.”

What can you do with the post once its been published on your site? Denise suggests turning the content into different formats such as “reports, white papers, articles, slide shows, videos, podcasts, teleseminars, ebooks, etc.”

One place where you can repurpose your content is in your email newsletter by including a few lines in a short piece and linking back to your blog. That way you’ve not only repurposed the content but possibly have taken your non-blog reading client to your posts and demonstrated to them what they’ve been missing. Include too, a call to action to to sign-up to receive updates about your posts via rss feed or by email subscription.

This approach is consistent too with the findings of  new study by GetResponse e-mails where they found that that including options like share on Facebook or Twitter generated a higher click-through rate than e-mails without them.

Another good practice is creating a list of your recent popular posts and again driving the traffic back to your blog.  Ebooks, too, are very big and if you want a quick and easy way to turn the content into a pdf, a good tool is zinepal which we wrote about in an earlier post, Repurposing the Written Word: Getting the Most Bang from Your Content.

Speaking of email newsletters, you can also archive your past newsletters and create links from your website and blog back to past issues. Of course Twitter and Facebook are good for promoting your posts but you can take it a step further by using snippets of the content to draw readers to the site.

When you start thinking about repurposing content you’ll come up with a lot of creative strategies for insuring that you get the most value you can from the time you created original content.

What strategies do you use for repurposing your content?

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve been thinking more about the one deal a day business model since our post last week, “Who’s Buying In to Groupon, LivingSocial & the One-Deal-a-Day Business Model,” which explored the demographics of users.

In a recent post by Barrett Lane,  a blogger for Yipit, he  looks at considerations for businesses who are contemplating running an online daily deal.  We also found a post by Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, which sheds some interesting light on the psychology of persuasion and what motivates individuals to act on a purchase.

Last but not least, a discussion of one day a deal offers wouldn’t be complete without looking at how engaged a business is in social networking.

Factors for Businesses Considering Online Daily Deals
Barrett suggests five things you should know if you’re interested in learning how your business can cash in on the daily deal craze:
1. Evaluate the best day of the week
2. Pick the deal service that delivers the right volume for your business
3. Look for chances to up-sell your higher end product
4. Find your niche site e.g. Groupon, LivingSocial, Village Vines, BlackboardEats, etc.
5. Encourage customers who like deals to sign up for your mailing list, follow on twitter, Facebook and check in via Foursquare as a way to get additional discounts.

What Motivates Individuals to Act on a Purchase?
Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, referenced  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, a book by Robert Cialdini in his post. Ciadlini suggests that five factors motivate individuals to act on an opportunity:
1. Scarcity-Is the opportunity available for a limited time
2. Social proof-are others purchasing the deal
3. Commitment-is the decision consistent with a choice the individual has made in the past
4. Liking-does the individual know and like the purveyor
5. Authority-does the source hold sway.

Social Networking Engagement
As Barrett suggests customers should be encouraged to follow-up and sign-up after purchasing an online deal. The rapid proliferation of companies flocking to one deal a day websites makes us curious about how well the business is doing with social networking sites. We suggest the following:
1. Social Networking for the Long Haul-Businesses should be in social networking for the long haul e.g. not just the weeks before the deal and the immediate weeks which follow
2. Offer Compelling Content-Along with follow-up opportunities for additional discounts, offer compelling content. People don’t always want to be sold to. Constantly coming at them with another way to spend money may be off putting. Instead if you’re a day spa who offered a deal about a facial, offer content about tips for cleansing the skin, staying hydrated during the summer, how to maintain healthy skin.
3. Experiment and Assess Social Networks: Find out which network works best with your followers. Are they more inclined to read your blog, follow you on twitter, read your facebook updates, subscribe to an email newsletter? If you don’t know, you can ask them in a quick survey. Most important, offer different types of content in the different channels. Re-purposed content should offer another slant or an expanded discussion. Don’t look the same everywhere you are–your users will become bored and move on.

What factors would you add for businesses to consider about online daily deals?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

There’s a lot happening on the Internet these days. People are looking forward to checking their e-mails and following businesses on Facebook and Twitter all in the name of deals, not any deals for that matter, but the “one deal a day” type. One deal a day is a web-based business model in which a single type of product is offered for sale for a period of 24 hours…and operate within geographic territories.

People are not only checking their e-mails and reading online content about deals but business is reportedly up for Groupon, LivingSocial and their competitors. Techcrunch reports that people are buying coupons for restaurants, massages, discounted memberships to fitness clubs and museums, local activities, tourist attractions, and merchandise.

Marketing has always been about looking at demographics and understanding what sells in specific markets. Techcrunch states “You can tell a lot about a city by what is being bought on Groupon.” Apparently Boston residents love laser hair removal, Segways, and learning how to fly a helicopter. San Diegans are into Pole Dancing, unlimited carnival rides. Denver loves Cold Stone Creamery and Speed Raceway. Atlanta is into NASCAR and Chicagoans enjoy the Tall Ships.  The site has accumulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. Groupon states that their customers are socially active, both online and off. 68% are between 18-34; 50% have a bachelor’s degree, 30% graduate degree; 49% are single, 33% married; 77% women, 23% men. 66% read Groupon write-ups every day and use Groupon primarily as a guide to explore their city. (see more about groupon’s demographics)

From a company’s perspective there’s really nothing to lose by signing up to promote a business on a “one deal a day” website. If the minimum number of people haven’t signed on, the deal isn’t on. One deal a day websites do the upfront work. Groupon for example, will write the copy which they say “ranges from the straightforward to the whimsical and bizarre.” A recent article in the New York Times pointed out that one write-up for a spa focused on trivia which related to the the spelling of “spa” e.g. Spackle should never be used as toothpaste and Spanky was the only member of the Little Rascals brave enough to donate his brain to science during World War II. As Times writer, Randall Stross says, “If good advertising is supposed to be memorable, this is very good.”

Groupon refers to the experience as “collective buying” and offers consumers discounts of 40 to 90%. Participating merchants collect 50 to 70% of the face value of the deal. LivingSocial takes the process one step further after you buy the deal by sending you a unique link to share. If three people buy the deal using your link, then your deal is free.

Will you consider using a service like Groupon or LivingSocial as a consumer? For your business? If you’ve used already, what have your experiences been like?

Social Media may be one of the most written about topics out there and yet what’s so interesting is that people are still looking for ways to define and implement it into our lives. Last week, Mashable asked readers to define social media and submit their answers via Twitter—which was a good idea, too, to limit the responses to 140 characters. Tweets are very effective, done nicely they make everything seem so profound!

That’s how I felt about the 20 best reader responses when I read them, which Mashable has classified with key characteristics such as: collaboration, network, conversation, sharing, etc.

I’d add to their list: Timely: Social Media is all the news fit to blog, tweet and post.

What about you? What would you add?

P.S. Tell Your Friends & Followers & Join in the Celebration of Social Media Day on June 30th!

With 1 million users and counting, Foursquare is touted as the next hot social media tool.  But is there a business application?  Should marketers care, or is it just another passing fad?

Foursquare is a location-based social networking service for the web and mobile devices, as well as a game.

The mobile app, calculates your location, and provides you with a list of restaurants and stores in the area.  You find your restaurant in the list, select it, and touch “Check-In Here.”  If you are hoping to locate people, you can include a brief “shout-out” message – “mini college reunion with Rachel and Pam!” -  which quickly spreads to your friends on Foursquare, and also Facebook and Twitter.

This is just one example of why city dwellers are tapping into this new service.  In addition to this friend-finding aspect, Foursquare is also a game.  Users compete citywide to earn the most points each week.  Each check-in earns that user one point.  Extra points are earned through “badges,” awarded to the user after certain events (25 different places checked-in, out four nights in a row, etc.)

As the number of users has grown, the rewards have become more tangible.  A user becomes the “mayor” of a location if he or she has checked-in there more than any other user.  Businesses in turn are rewarding their mayors with real-world benefits.  Local bars and restaurants are offering free or discounted food and drink, and chains like Starbucks and Whole Foods have launched coupon programs for Foursquare mayors.

And Foursquare promotions are not limited to food and drinks.  Higher-end fashion chains like Diesel and Marc Jacobs have also launched Foursquare campaigns, as have media outlets like NBC, the New York Times and The History Channel.

Given that this is social media, and these campaigns are both new and ongoing, exact ROI numbers are difficult to find.  Starbucks has garnered the most press for its use of Foursquare, and its campaigns are likely to be tracked extensively in the blogosphere as the key test case for the viability of Foursquare marketing.

While the ROI of Foursquare marketing is uncertain, what is certain is that location-based social networking is becoming increasingly in-demand and important for marketers.  Twitter added a geo-location feature in November 2009, and Facebook’s location options are set to debut this month.  Foursquare also has a growing number of competitors in the location-based social networking sphere, including Gowalla and Yelp.

Mike Proulx of Hill Holiday recently shared some good examples of businesses using Foursquare on the company’s blog.

With 15,000 new users joining Foursquare every day, this new social media tool is fast becoming a new and powerful way to engage with customers.

[Catherine Weber contributed to this post]

Charlene Li ‘s new  book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, opens with a memorable story about musician, Dave Carroll, and his unfortunate incident when United Airlines damaged his guitar. Nine months later, when Carroll hadn’t made any progress being compensated for his guitar, he did something a little different to vent his feelings. He made a music video called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted it on YouTube. Charlene writes, “Within three days, the video had over one million views, and Carroll’s anthem became a viral sensation. By the end of 2009, there had been over seven million views and hundreds of news stories about Carroll’s experience.”

With this story, Charlene lays the groundwork for her new work about the ways in which social technology has changed the shift in power, where “individuals have the ability to broadcast their views to the world.”

Throughout the book, we learn from one example after another, how leaders need to find a way to communicate as openly as they can, and how this comes more easily for some than others. Charlene includes Open Leadership Self-Assessment tools so leaders can determine where they fall in the spectrum. She offers hope too for those who may not naturally be inclined towards openness by suggesting they start small. As she says, “It’s hard to suspend a mind-set that’s driven you throughout your professional career-it may feel completely unnatural to you and go against every fiber in your body.”

The book also includes useful Action Plans and Open Strategy Checklists. We learn too how leaders can (and should) partner with the optimists and strong collaborators in their organizations, and create a culture that supports being open.

While all leaders won’t comfortably gravitate to blogging or maintaining a presence on Facebook, Charlene gives two great examples of how some businesses have found workarounds. She tells the story about Bill Marriott, the CEO of hotel chain Marriott International who started blogging in 2007. But Marriott wasn’t comfortable with using the technology and couldn’t even type so a member of the communications staff records what he wants to say, transcribes it, and posts the text and audio file on his blog. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was concerned that blogging wouldn’t be a good fit for him so instead he tried a video blog.

The last chapter of the book, “How Openness Transforms Organizations” includes seven recommendations: 1) create a sense of urgency with information sharing, 2) identify the values that will carry you through the transformation, 3) lead by example, 4) encourage risk taking; reward risks taken, 5) start small to win big, 6) institutionalize systems and structures, 7) be patient.

With many valuable lessons and tools of the trade, Open Leadership will rightfully take its place on the virtual and brick-and-mortar Best of Business Book shelves for years to come.

If you had to answer the question right now, would you say you and your organization are open to practicing open leadership? What would make it possible?

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of  Open Leadership for this blog post. Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945.

In a recent post on The Huffington Post, blogger Kety Esquivel discusses what she describes as the converging worlds of new media/social media/journalism/communications/marketing. As I read her post I was reminded how in the past week on every check-out line I was on I saw the covers of two high-profile magazines which epitomized convergence. The Atlantic Monthly’s cover had the word “Google” in a large font while Time magazine was sporting the word, “FaceBook”.

The Atlantic Monthly’s story “How to Save the News” by James Fallows, describes the ways in which Google is trying to “bring the news business back to life.” Fallows writes that Google now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects. Two important developments for Google were Google News, “a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time and Google Alerts, a way to stay on top of the topics important to you.

Fallows says, “But all of their [Google’s] plans for reinventing a business model for journalism involve attracting money to the Web-based news sites now available on computers, and to the portable information streams that will flow to whatever devices evolve from today’s smart phones, iPods and iPads, Nooks and Kindles, and mobile devices of any other sort.”

The three pillars of the new online business model are described by Fallows as “distribution, engagement, and monetization… getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads.”

Of course, the critical ingredient for news whether it’s online or in print is well-written and compelling content. Readers will engage with a story when the story draws them in and keeps them there to the end. It’s no longer a given that we will read a newspaper from front to back. Readers will pick and choose. A good website and a good print publication will keep tabs on what their readers want to read.

Fallows says, “Spending time with an article, whether in print or online, is of course the definition of ‘engagement’.” If you’re interested in the converging worlds of new media and journalism, I think you’ll find the article “How to Save the News” well worth your time.

Enjoy your Memorial Day Weekend and let us know where you’ve been reading the news (e.g. online, print, desktop, smartphone, iPad, etc,) and what stories kept you engaged.

Photo Credit: Tharum Bun

You probably know more about Facebook than you realize. Perhaps you even know more than you care to know. Seems these days information about Facebook can be found everywhere. The iconic “F” Follow us on Facebook may even feel like they’re following you. And, now with the thumbs-up “like” symbol vying for your attention every place you look—what’s a person to do?

For starters, you can brush up on the Facebook facts you might not have known before this fun infographic. 

And here’s another new hot-off-the-internet story about how Time Magazine’s May 31 issue will hit newsstands with a cover and feature story about Facebook and how it’s redefining privacy.

What Facebook facts or trivia can you add to the conversation?

50 settings with more than 170 options, Facebook’s Privacy Policy is longer than the United States Constitution!  See the full size.

[Source: Online MBA for MashableMashable.com]

Recently, I had a conversation with a few colleagues about how they search and whether they ever click on a sponsored link. Even though I’ve never once clicked on one of the links on the right hand side of the google search results page, their answers surprised me. It was a unanimous, No! It got me thinking about the whole phenomenon of pay-per-click advertising, who uses it and for what.

I decided to pose the following question to a group of marketers on LinkedIn–to see if I’ve been missing something.

“When you do a Google Search, do you click on the sponsored links on the right-hand side of the page? -Sometimes, never, always Why? Do you click differently personally vs. professionally?”

Here’s some of their comments below:

1. “Have to admit I never even look at the sponsored ads on the right hand side. They don’t catch my attention and I never think to even read them. if what I’m looking for isn’t in the first few search results I’ll tend to try a different search string, but I’ll never glance over to the ads. maybe that’s ad blindness caused by excessive web use!”

2. “Sometimes, if the description seems directly applicable to what I’m looking for.”

3. “I rarely click on any banner. Perhaps once a month.
Mainly, I’m too focused on what I’m doing or seeking to waste time on a tangent.”

4. “Rarely. I am much more inclined to click on the organic listings, however I have clicked on a PPC ad a couple times when I’ve been in the market to buy a specific product online (like area rugs or picture frames).”

5. “I mostly stick to the organic search results. If the ads are directly related to what I am looking for then I might click on it.”

6. “Of course the free clicks unless I want to spend my competition’s money?”

7. “Very rarely. I tend to trust organic placement as Google is pretty hot on scam sites. Sponsored links need to be relevant to a search query but are higher risk.”

8. “Fortunately a casual user will not necessarily know what a sponsored link means. I use PPC for testing keyword effectiveness so that is probably a good thing.”

9. “I rarely click on sponsored links – They rarely offer what I’m looking for.”

10. Never. Unless I’m just in the mood to spend my competitors money….

11. “Never, unless I would have chosen them anyway.”

12. “Never! It’s weird, I’ve never once clicked on a Google ad of any kind. I always assume search results will have what I need and if not I use a different term. Same with the links in my gmail account — just seems like spam to me.”

13. “Sometimes, when necessary, sure…”

14. “Even before I fully understood Search Engine Optimization and how Search Engines utilize logarithms for natural listings, I would rarely click on sponsored links. This is because organic listings seemed to be more effective at providing me with the information I needed.”

After studying SEO and implementing SEO strategies, I now may click on a sponsored link once a month. Simply, the organic search results are more relevant. Companies pay for sponsored links to appear when certain keywords are searched, but organic listings are direct results of relevant content.

I have had discussions with other students at my university and it seems like the preference of organic listings is a consensus. Consumers are smart. They want relevant and meaningful results. After several searches, consumers learn to ignore the links that are being pushed on them (sponsored links) and prefer those that they are pulling out (natural listings). In my case this sediment has been applied both in my personal and professional spheres.

What about you? Do you ever click on the sponsored links? Sometimes, never, always.
Why? Do you click differently personally vs. professionally?”

image credit: Danard Vincente

Social media can have an impact on health care organizations, whether the organization has proactive programs or passively chooses to ignore it. By doing nothing, hospitals are at more legal risk because no clear guidelines articulate how staff should participate in social communities, how doctors share medical advice on blogs and where patients get medical information.

Andrew Cohen of Forum One, recently wrote about the session he attended at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, which identified legal issues as the top concerns of hospital administrators. Second to this is “lack of comfort with social media by administrators as well as staff…”

With patients helping themselves to information on websites that may or may not be good information, hospitals and other healthcare organizations like lifecare facilities have an opportunity to help guide patients and their families to good information and support.

In fact, every department needs to consider how social media effects them including human resources, legal, marketing, IT, patient services, and each and every medical specialty.   In 2009, we met with many of the SVPs  at a major teaching hospital north of Boston, Lahey Clinic, to give them a sense of what they need to think about.

Key to a social media strategy that has many public facing thought leaders guidance and training. For these programs to be successful, they need to have participation and commitment from all of the major leaders in the organization.

Components of a social media strategy

Some of the components of a good strategy should include:

• Guidelines for usage-legal, HR and IT need to work together to determine what is appropriate social media usage on the job, and create a social media policy (or guidelines) and educate employees on their expectations for behavior.
• Marketing and media relations- the organization should update their media policy to include interviews on blogs, podcasts and web videos, as well as provide guidance for medical professionals on giving medical advice online.
• Thought leadership-Marketing should also develop a strategy on how to use the thought leadership of top physicians, through blogging, twitter accounts, podcasts and video, and mobile apps to promote the expertise of the hospital.
• Patient Services -Hospitals can engage patients through community forums and help them get answers to questions about their illness, surgery or recovery.

Marketing should implement these strategies centrally in a coordinated fashion as an extension of the overall marketing strategy, rather than leave it to each medical specialty to fend for themselves. Ideally there would be a new role at the hospital for a social media director who would work along side and collaborate with the traditional Marketing Communications Director.  Some hospitals hire outside consultants to start, then figure out what is needed in house after the initially strategy is developed.

The message is this: social media is the new way that we all get information, and it must be taken seriously. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations cannot afford to ignore it.

Seven things to stop doing on Facebook via Consumer Reports, June 2010 issue:

1. Using a weak password
2. Leaving your full birth date in your profile
3. Overlooking useful privacy controls
4. Posting your child’s name in a caption
5. Mentioning you’ll be away from home
6. Letting search engines find you
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

What else do you do to protect your privacy?

Also of interest:
Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
How To: Disable Facebook’s Instant Personalization” [Privacy]

Check-out our Podcast Interview with Author, Phil Simon

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear someone talk about the challenge of keeping up with technology. Most of the time it’s an individual talking about things like new mobile phones, iphone apps, google docs, search engines–you get the picture. But think about how difficult it must be for CIO’s and people working in corporate Information Technology departments; people who are responsible for choosing systems and applications and having to make decisions on where and how to spend their IT dollars.

This is why people like Phil Simon are so important. Simon is the author of a new book, The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos, who collaborated with a network of experts to write about a wide spectrum of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.The book demystifies topics you may have thought were hands-off to you: SaaS (software as a service), enterprise search and retrieval (ESR), service-oriented architecture (SOA). The book also covers topics which may feel more mainstream at this point such as cloud computing, mobile technologies, and social networking.

The Next Wave of Technologies is a must-read for IT professionals who are scrambling to keep up with the implications of new technologies and a book for their colleagues who need to interface with them. Students and consulting firms will also benefit from reading the book. Simon writes, “…it does not provide all of the answers to any one technology, but summarizes the questions that readers should be asking themselves.”

Simon concludes, “In the end, no one has a crystal ball predicting how any technology will ultimately be used and by whom. Even the experts in this very book cannot foresee with any degree of certainty where we are going, much less how we are going to get there. In five years, any one of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies in this book may have already fizzled. We may look back at any one of them and say, “What were we thinking?…It will be a bumpy but exciting ride with magnificent rewards at the end for those able to find opportunity in chaos.”

One thing is clear, we can’t bury our head in the sand until the next wave of technologies settle. All of us who want to stay current and competitive need to have a good picture of the choices out there today and the effects they will have on the ways we communicate professionally and personally.

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of The Next Wave of  Technologies for this blog post. Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945.