Recently in Social Networking Category

POSTED BY MIKE, 2009

     I'm turning 40! I can't believe this milestone came so quickly. It seems like only yesterday for so many of my previous milestones: First day at school; first car; graduating high school; graduating college; first day at my first "real" job; my wedding day (Love you, Dear!) and of course, the birth of Lucas (who, as I write this, is outside playing up a storm in a t-shirt and shorts!) I can't remember ever still being in shorts at this time of year. Thinking back, the summers have been getting warmer and longer. Surely a sign of climate change! Not to mention the shorter winters and less snow. We can barely squeeze in 5 or 6 weekend trips to the slopes, anymore.

     Enough sulking! I was completely blown away that the family all pitched in for the new truck. Actually, it's an SUV, but I like the more manly description of truck. I need something to set me apart from the rest of the crowd on the roads - I'm not sure they even make small cars any more. At least the gas prices have come down and we won't go broke filling the thing up after all the 1 mile trips back and forth to the store. I'm starting to think society has reached the peak of laziness. When I was a kid, we used to ride our bikes to the store just for some Necco wafers. But, it was cooler back then and I have to admit, I take great comfort in the A/C havens of car (now truck!) and home. I'm just glad we didn't settle in the parts of the country that seem to be getting hit by hurricanes or forest fires or earthquakes these days. Is it just me, or are these events increasing in frequency?

     Maybe Lucas will be able to report on this at his 40th b-day... after he finishes playing in the fallen leaves, or course!

POSTED BY LUCAS, 2040

     I've just received a wonderful 40th birthday present, snow! My Dad handed down his childhood toboggan a few years ago, but Jason hasn't been able to use it since it hasn't snowed. We've been having fun today riding the toboggan and making snow angels. I started to think that he wouldn't be able to enjoy snow anymore, like I did as a growing up. The weather has been really strange this year. I was getting used to hearing reports of hundreds of people dying in storms but this year the weather has been pretty calm. Maybe the climate has stabilized and we can expect regular season changes from now on.

     It's been an exciting week. I traded in my gasoline car for an all electric car. All of the gas stations in our area finally converted their gas pumps to electric car charging stations. I'm so glad since gasoline is so expensive now. Gasoline powered cars have become a rare thing. They are just recycling the materials from the old gasoline cars to get them off the road. It's taken a while to get people to upgrade their cars, but it's been worth it.

     Initially I was depressed about turning 40, but things have never been better. It looks live we've done enough to get things back to normal. It's nice to know that Jason will be able to live in a world where he won't have to worry about the climate.

POSTED BY JASON, 2072

    Wow, I can not believe I am turning 40 years old. At least I do not feel 40 yet, so I have no complaints. Maybe I will feel more my age once I have children of my own, which should not be long now since just a week ago the doctor confirmed that Linda was pregnant. What a great birthday surprise! I wish my father could be around to share this moment with me.

     Just the other day Linda and I were cleaning out the attic and we found my fathers old toboggan. It made me think about him and how close we were. He was taken from us a few years ago due to sun exposure and I miss him every day. Some of my fondest memories of my father was with that toboggan and those winters upstate. I can not even recall the last time I have even seen snow, it has snowed around here in about 10 years. It worries me to think that my child may only witness snow through a television screen. It is strange how much I do miss that cold snow.

     Everything has changed, though. We are seeing diseases that we can not explain, let alone cure. Hell, we can not even go outside for more then a few hours a day, and some days the exposure warnings don’t let us out at all. With the days being so hot it is a shame when you can’t spend it at the beach.

     We watch the news and see constant forest fires just west of here. The smoke lingers in the air, making it hard to breath and giving the air an eerie grey glow. I am still trying to get used to it.  The sea level keeps going up, much faster then the Corp of Engineers can even work to slow it down a little. I do admire the resources that the government puts in to trying to combat the rising waters, but I also feel it is a waste of good tax money. They have already raised our taxes 4 times in the past few years to try and combat all these problems we are having.

     I hear Linda calling me, I will try to write more later. I know I have been a little neglectful lately.

(7 Months Later)

     Gaaash, Our doctor is unable to diagnose Linda’s disease, and she is getting weaker with every passing day. I think we are both drained due to losing the baby. Neither of us are sure we want to continue on. Most of the time, doctors cannot diagnose the cause of illnesses, but I think it is due to the unpredictable weather we have everyday. Our bodies are experiencing extreme cold one day and extreme hot weather the next.

(6 Months Later)

     Linda passed away today. We had been living without a doctor for the last 6 months. Almost everyone in our town has been wiped out in the last few years.  I am so frightened!  Just across the street I can see the factories, which are still in operation, because machines do not get effected by the weather.  Who will use these products once everyone is gone?

(3 Months Later)

     I am getting weaker every day.  I see machines and robots everywhere. I wonder if I am the last human being on earth or if there may be a few more strugling with their diseases.  I wish we could reboot the climate. If humans survive I hope they will not play with nature, or take things for granted, as we did.

>>>SYSTEM DATE: 2098-10-15<<<
>>>No human activity for 20 years. Shutting down all systems.<<<

  
EPILOGUE
     The events depicted above might seem extreme or exaggerated to you, but although they are fictional, there is a hint of truth in every fiction. Our current world is plagued by conflicts because of scarce resources and environmental disasters.  Hurricanes, tidal floods and landslides occur more frequently and our nature is losing its beauty due to pollution. If we preserve our nature, we preserve the beauty of the world we live in, which increases our quality of life overall. Even if you might not agree with our view on climate change you have to agree that the benefits of using our available resources efficiently are self-explanatory.

     The topic of resource dependency has been recently brought up more and more when talking about national security.  China’s oil consumption has more than doubled in the last decade and there are 1,300,000,000 Chinese people, who would like to drive a car, just as you do. Whether you like it or not, just like a company traded in the stock market, we are competing as a nation with other economies worldwide for resources, goods and services. If we are wasteful, we will have the same prospect future as a wasteful company.

     If we can ease some of the resource conflicts we are currently steering into, we all will live better and probably longer. You might ask yourself, “but what can I do as a single person?” Well, If you were to run a company and could reduce your cost per manufactured product (=resources) by 15%, would you not do it?  Now, just image the effect on oil dependency if the U.S could save 15% of gasoline on every mile driven by a car. Also, aside from the effects for a single nation, think about what efficient use of resources can do for humanity as a whole. Think about what we could do with all the money that we save. Think about what the future could be like if we can make scarce resources plentiful.

Below you will find a few links, leading to interesting information on how to save resources.

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=home_improvement.hm_improvement_index
EPA Website – This link leads to the homepage of the EPA and the “Energy Star” seal. It has plenty of information available on how you can make you household more energy efficient.

http://www.charitywater.org/
Charitywater – Checkout this interesting charity, which is trying to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

http://www.ftc.gov/energysavings
FTC – This great website presents tips on how to save energy in your household in a very appealing and easy to navigate format. Check it out; your savings might pay for your monthly cell phone bill.
 

This Blog Action Day post was a collaborative effort by:
Ali, Software Engineer
Mike, Support Director
Phil, Network Manager
Robert, Software Engineer
Shad, Developer

MarketingSherpa's Marketing and the Economy Survey shows an overall picture that offline marketing is definitely on the decline and online marketing is on the rise. I want to delve a little deeper into the online marketing trend.

Why are businesses adding more online marketing and reducing offline? Well, I'm a web analyst so my view of this answer may be a little biased. However, when marketing dollars are being cut, it makes the most sense to spend your money where you can definitively measure what you are getting in return. All online marketing can be measured using web analytics tools, whether it's email marketing, banner ads, pay-per-click or anything else. If properly implemented, all of these campaigns can be measured. How, exactly, do you measure the impact a billboard ad has had on your revenue for the year?

Let's look at the top three increasing online marketing items:

Web 2.0

The survey shows that 48% of marketers are adding dollars to their Web 2.0 (social network marketing) budgets. How is that measurable, and what do you get from it? There are many levels of social networking, and each will have its own goal. Check out The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing. Here's an example of what happened when our SEO team created a StumbleUpon post for one of our golf clients. On the day of the post, traffic increased 48% above the average daily visits. These visitors had a 45% lower bounce rate than the site as a whole. So not only does the post help our SEO efforts, the post boosted the site activity, and started building relationships with these new visitors.

Paid Search

Paid search has proven to have one of the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) - IF it is done right. We have seen great success stories from our clients with 500%-3500% ROAS. We are also now seeing some interesting trends on how paid search campaigns can help with natural search conversions due to the synergistic effect paid and natural search have together. As my colleague, Brian Carter, mentions in a recent blog post, "When you show both, you make a bigger impact on the buyer, which increases attention and trust, thereby increasing traffic, conversions, conversion rate, decreasing cost per conversion, increasing ROI."

Emailing to House Lists

This option has just as high a percentage increase as did Web 2.0. From my perspective, this is hands down, one of the best returns on spend out there. Judging from the 48% of marketing putting more money into this venue, clearly I'm not alone in this opinion. We have seen time and time again clients getting 1000% or more return on spend. If you train your subscribers well, don't abuse your list, and send quality messages, you won't be disappointed with this decision.

That being said, not all online marketing is increasing.

Emailing to Rented Lists

NOT ALL EMAIL IS CREATED EQUAL! This is why I am not surprised to see 43% of marketers reducing spend here. With more and more companies implementing web analytics, I believe it has shown that many rented lists do not perform as well as we would like. Why spend the money here, when you know your existing list gets a much better response?

Online Display Advertising

43% of survey respondents are reducing spend here as well.  Why?  In general, display ads are more costly than other makreting media, and that drives up the cost per acquisition, and brings down the return on spend.

Every company has a different marketing budget and different goals.  Maybe you are still adamant about sending email through rented lists.  I'm not going to stop you, but I am going to insist that you measure your results.  Look at your conversion rates, cost per lead, return on spend.  The numbers will speak for themselves.  You be the judge of your marketing effors to see which onces give you the best bang for your buck, and then spend more on those efforts.

Stuart Butler and I were recently interviewed by a reporter for a local dining guide about the latest techniques in web design, pay per click, SEO, social media, and email marketing for restaurants.

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Twitter is a fast moving world and what you say can easily be missed by your loyal followers.  But just how fast moving are your followers’ twitter streams?  Thanks to the URL shortening service bit.ly we now know the answer is just a brief five minutes.

We asked the author of @thewholeworld, who has about 2,500 followers, to run a series of three tests promoting various funny videos or articles.  What we found was surprising; nearly all traffic to those links was within five minutes of the tweet.  After that… nothing.

The three adjacent graphs show the 30 minutes following a tweet and the activity generated from the link.  What this illustrates is that while a tweet lasts forever in search.twitter.com, it only lasts for a few moments in the eyes of 99% of your followers.  If you have a follower who is not watching their twitter stream when you tweet, your message falls on def ears since you're likely going to be off of their 1st page.

So, based on this, how effective is twitter at spreading the word and what can you do to make the most of the technology?

1. Its not mass market communication.
   If you're tweeting with the expectation that the world is listening, you're wrong.  Only a handful of your followers who are online right then know what you've just said.
2. Join the discussion. 
   This proves that a simple one way broadcast can easily get overlooked by your followers.  It's a far better strategy to join the conversation and talk with those you're following (and likely vice versa) than to just stand up and shout. 
3. Tweet, & tweet often. 
   There's an old advertising adage that goes, "you market to a parade, not a standing army."  Nowhere is this truer than in the twitterverse.  If you're not constantly communicating and spreading your brand, you're missing out.  That great message you just tweeted, won't be seen five minutes from now.
4. It's a relationship, not just a sale.
   Twitter is all about relationships and being an active part of the community.  If you're hoping to just jump in and tweet every now and then, you're not building a relationship and missing the most valuable part of Twitter.  Yes, there's money to be found and made on Twitter, but it's not in the traditional fashion.  Before you can expect to cash in, you've got to build the relationship with your followers.
5. You can probably promote an amazing deal. 
   If only a fraction of your audience will ever see that last tweet, you can feel relatively safe to experiment with some pretty great deals.  Let's say you're a hotel, try to promote a 5 minute deal to your followers for a 5 dollar room.  Anyone who calls or books in within five minutes through a unique URL would get an incredible deal.  Anyone who didn't will wish they'd been following you or paying more attention.  The result.  You get great word of mouth, likely new consumers and build a great relationship with your followers.

The moral of the story is that twitter is like any social event you've ever attended.  You can't expect the person you've just met to know what you told someone in a previous conversation.  So get involved, have fun and make connections with your consumers.

Today I saw a tweet from Guy Kawasaki about social networking boosting hotel revenues.

Being that a good portion of our interactive work is with hotels, my digital ears pricked up.

This jumped out of the article at me: "PodCulture then went live in January 2008, and Elkayam says the social network is responsible for the additional 40 percent revenue increase the hotel experienced this year."

Fuel CEO Will McIntosh and I were just at the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce yesterday explaining how a private social network could create additional value for their members.

Google Trends shows that social networking usage rose dramatically in 2008:

Data on private social networks is harder to come by, but this case study proving significant revenue increases makes it clear this is a viable strategy all hotel groups need to consider. 

Is a Private Social Network Right for Your Hotel?

As with all new marketing strategies, the first movers stand to gain the largest piece of the pie.

How much of the market does your hotel want? 

And could your hotel use a new marketing advantage and customer retention tool right now?

Aside from the daily grind at Fuel Interactive, I'm a powerhouse dad blogger who's used to seeing big two-digit numbers of visitors on my blog, www.therogueparent.com. Like most site owners, I imagined the day my site would cross into the three digit world of over 100 visitors in a single day, but my previous high of 60 was well short of cracking Alexia's top sites.

That is until I discovered the power of social marketing first hand through an integrated promotional campaign to launch my latest post, "All Bands Should Take Names from Photoshop," to internet stardom.  It all began around the lunch table when we were discussing the great potential band names hidden inside of Adobe Photoshop such as Gaussian blur, angled strokes and the great gamut warning.

After writing the post and sharing a link on my typical parenting sites such as HusbandsandDads.com, parenting type magazines and others, we took the campaign social by tweeting, Digging, Stumbling and Facebooking the post.   What happened next is not a big deal to the Amazon.com's of the world, but a gigantic success for a small blogger like me.  The adjacent graph shows how my user sessions went from an average of 24 per day to a peak of 717, an almost 3,000 percent growth.

Five Steps to Launch Your Site into the Stratosphere of the Blogosphere:

#1: Write Something People Care About

I've been posting parenting insights, product reviews and commentary to the Rogue Parent for about eight months and never saw much more than 50 user sessions on any given day.  That is until I wrote about something people cared about, if not just for humor's sake.

Lesson one when writing content: if no one cares... no one cares.  You may have the greatest post in the world about the perfect way to carve a face in a bar of soap, but if no one is interested, it's not going to get read much less picked up socially.  Once you have something others like the social benefits are amazing.

#2: Start the buzz on Twitter

Twitter is an amazing resource that gets completely overlooked by those who have never used the service.  If you've tried Twitter, give it a shot.  Thanks to the following twitter people my post was promoted to over 11,000 people:

• @briancarter shared the post with 6,500 people
• @lookadoo shared it with 575
• @pdimaio shared it with 90
• @iodine74 shared it with 150
• @dawnMHSH shared it with 320
• @thewholeworld shared with 1,200
• @chuckobama shared with 2,100

#3: Tell Your Friends on Facebook

For me, this only accounted for a little over 100 people; though on average a Facebook user has 164 friends.  The goal of this element of the campaign was to get my friends to comment on my profile to spread my influence to their network.

#4: Hit the Social Bookmarks

This is the social networking 101 aspect of my launch to parent-blogger stardom.  Several people Dugg my post and many more Stumbled it.  This was my single biggest source of traffic to the site and continues to drive users to the site.  If you're promoting an article, site, or anything web based, you've got to make sure you spread the word on the social bookmarks.

#5: Share With the Like Minded

Got something that the people on a message board would like to see, make sure you let them know.  A simple, "New article on the hidden band names in Photoshop, check it out." Can do wonders for traffic and start the viral snowball of traffic.

There's countless more ways to spread your message virally through video, linking, email and more.  These are just five of the ways you can make a big impact.  Though one thing I've found is if you want it done right on a big scale, call in the professionals. 

It may not be a Wii game but I found myself intrigued by an MP3 player novelty called “Live Jam Band” where 3 little aliens with instruments play to the music coming from your iPod (obviously, I’m easily amused). I clicked on the ad to view a pop up window with the information about the product.   The price, the button to add to your cart, the button to buy now online – all normal items that have been on the online shopping scene for years now.  

 

In Facebook, I was automatically taken to a page where it posts the link and I can put a comment…

 

I hit post and went to my profile and voila! Listed on my profile for everyone to see was a link to the product that I’m interested in buying and my comment that “I might buy this”.

For those who doubt the strength and length of social networking, this tool just goes to show you how powerful it can be.  Standard marketing techniques (ie newspaper flyers) may still be around for years to come, however, with tools like this in the making, viral marketing may very well completely overtake traditional ways of advertising.  Learning to harness social networks for sales and advertising will be key to catch the eye of the of the mobile and Internet-savvy generation.

 For the record, while I did share the project with others in my social networks, I decided not to get the product.  Perhaps someone who follows me on Twitter or is friends with me on Facebook will!

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

Last week, Fuel Interactive's CEO Will McIntosh and I spoke to a small group of association executives at the South Carolina Society of Association Executives' 3rd Annual Conference about how they can use social networking to bring their communications with their membership into the 2.0 era.

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations presentation mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.

I wasn't too aware of the whole "professional associations" world (also called professional bodies) before we were asked to speak at this conference, but every profession from lawyers to doctors to asphalt industry professionals has an association, they all have memberships, and they're perfect to make use of web 2.0- they already have people, they just need to connect them.

Here are some of the things we discussed:

• Web 2.0, Blogging, bunches of web 2.0 tools
• Blogs vs. forums vs. listservs

Sites and Services:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Ning- Overview and Features
• Examples of Ning networks, some of which are associations
• Blogger, Wordpress

Social Networking and Web 2.0

• The best 2.0 sites for associations with limited resources
• Matching your social networking platform and your membership demographics
• Age and demographics issues with usage of 2.0 networks
• Quantcast demographic data on social networking sites

Making Your Association More 2.0

• Incentivizing members members to use 2.0 sites and services
• Using your existing email list to get people involved
• Leveraging membership to do the work for you!

Issues Associations May Have with Web 2.0

• Privacy Issues with blogs, Ning, and LinkedIn
• Comment moderation, spam filtering
• Professional discussions, discussion of legislation

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.