Social Media

Is Social Media Becoming More Popular than Email?

by blogmistress on March 12, 2009


Recently Tech News World cited a Nielsen report that indicated social networking and blogging are now more popular online activities than using email:

The statistics are hardly surprising, Jonathan Stark of Jonathan Stark Consulting told the E-Commerce Times. “Email was the killer app for the ’90s — it brought the Internet out of the geek realm to the grandma realm.”

In the 2000s, social networking is picking up where email left off, he said. Surprisingly, though, there are still large pockets of Internet users who have not embraced the social networking trend.

“I know people in tech even that still resist taking the plunge — they think it is a time waster when, in fact, it is the opposite,” Stark observed.

Indeed, one of the reasons for the medium’s popularity is its efficiency in communication.

“It is more efficient than sending out emails, which basically a one-to-one form of communication,” noted Stark.

That efficiency is what’s driving social networking’s popularity as an internal corporate communication tool, Jennifer Lindsay, director of digital services and social media evangelist with Eastwick Communications, told the E-Commerce Times.

“For a business with a heavy new business pipeline, social networks can retain information; they can be a starting point to assign team members that may not have been part of the pitch, for example. Social networks are the perfect way to capture the mind share of the individual and share it across the organization,” she explained.

Email, by contrast, doesn’t capture knowledge transfer, noted Lindsay.

Wow, can our businesses afford not to take notice?

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Twitter Glossary

by blogmistress on March 11, 2009

twitter


Okay, I’ve been encouraging participation in social media like Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is fun because it has it’s own language:

From Twitter Fan Wiki Glossary

  • Twashdot – News for twitterers. Stuff that doesn’t matter.
  • Twaiting – Twittering while waiting
  • Twaffic – Twitter traffic.
  • Twease – A person who teases people over Twitter.
  • Tweets – Posts on Twitter by twitterers.
  • Tweekend – Spending your entire Saturday and Sunday reading and posting via Twitter. (coined by Kim M. Bayne )
  • Tweeple – Twitter people, Twitter members, Twitter users
  • Tweepish – Feeling sheepish or regretful about something you tweeted.
  • Tweeps – Twitterites that follow each other from one social media/network to another.
  • Tweet-back – Bringing a previous tweet conversation or reference back into the current conversation.
  • Tweet-dropping – Eavesdropping on someone’s else’s Home Page in With Friends mode.
  • Tweetaholism – the continued use of Twitter as an addiction that is difficult to control
  • Tweeterboxes – Twitterers who tweet too much
  • Tweet – Not only a message on Twitter but another term for a Twitter user (often jokingly mistaken for a Twit).
  • TweetIn – When a group of twitterers agree to get together at a set time to twitter
  • Tweet(ing) – The act of posting to Twitter
  • Twexplanation – Sending a nebulous tweet and having to explain it while offline from twitter.
  • Tweetsulted, Tweetsult – What do you think it means, you dumb twitterer?
  • TweetUp – When twitterers meet in person.
  • Twittercal mass – A community that has achieved a critical mass of twitterers.
  • Twideo-cronicity – When you’re watching someone’s videos and they are simultaneously leaving a comment or tweet for/at/about you.
  • TwinkedIn – Inviting friends made on Twitter to “connect with you on LinkedIn”
  • Twis – To dis a fellow twitterer. Bad form.
  • Twitosphere – Community of twitterers
  • Twittastic – Fantastic, wonderful, superb; coined by the folks at Twitterholic when referring to their robots
  • Twittcrastination – Twittering as a form of procrastination
  • Twittduit – If you need to Tweet a friend that does not follow you, post a Twittduit asking your followers to pass a message.
  • Twitter-Light Zone – Where you are when you return to Twitter after any time away and feel disoriented and lost.
  • Twitterer – A user of Twitter.
  • Twittering – To send a Twitter message.
  • Twitterish – Erractic behavior with short outbursts.
  • Twittfeinated, Twigged Out, Twired – To be so hyped up on twittering that you cannot sleep
  • Twitterfly – Being a social butterfly on Twitter evidenced by extreme usage of @ signs.
  • Twitterject – Interject your tweet into an existing tweet stream of conversation.
  • Twitterloop – To be caught up with friend tweets and up on the conversation.
  • Twittermaps – A mashup technology that lets Twitter users find each other using Google maps.
  • Twitterpated – To be overwhelmed with Twitter messages.
  • Twitterphoria – The elation you feel when the person you’ve added as a friend adds you back.
  • Twitterrhea – The act of sending too many Twitter messages.
  • Twitterrific and Twitteroo – Two services that let users post to Twitter using a Mac or PC.
  • Twitterrific (2) – a really good Twitter thing
  • Twitterstream – the twitter timeline (public or friends)
  • Twittertories – Clusters of twittererers that follow and friend each other with little overlap with other clusters.
  • Twittertude – Bad Twitter attitude. Or a state of being, like solitude only with other people present.
  • Twittfessional – A confession made on Twitter
  • Twitticisms – Witty tweets
  • Twittish – Too skittish to twitter.
  • Twittsomnia – Twittering due to inability to sleep, thus compounding inability to sleep.
  • Twittworking – Networking with Twitterites using Twitter
  • Twixt and tween – Can’t decide who or what to tweet
  • Twoogle – Twitter as the human Google. Pose a question, get near-instantaneous results.
  • Twoops – When you accidentally send a private sms to Twitter
  • Twopsies – When you drop things because you are twittering.

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Traffic with Social Media

by blogmistress on March 10, 2009

traffic-jam


I read a couple of articles just this morning that backup what I have seen myself with my blogs. More and more traffic is coming from social media instead of just from search. That is an interesting phenomenon for businesses that have been focused just on search engine optimization.

SEO is still very important. Social media has not replaced search and at this point is not even equal to search but it is coming closer and closer. This points out just how important social media has become to businesses in building a web presence.

Small Biz Trends tells us:

According to a Nielsen report (PDF) out just yesterday, “two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time.”

People are using large social sites such as Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn to share news and information.  They are discussing brands at these sites.  It is not an isolated phenomenon, but a growing trend.

Consequently, Twitter and Facebook are becoming  sources for finding information — and driving traffic.

For businesses to succeed in this economy it is imperative that we take advantage of the opportunities available through social media and the internet.

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Microbusiness – the New Black

by blogmistress on March 5, 2009


I just read three articles in a row discussing the prediction in 2009 trending towards microbusinesses. What is a microbusiness? A microbusiness is typically defined an organization with less than five employees, small enough to require little capital ($35,000 or less) to get started. Microbusiness owners are the “…people who refer to themselves as soloists, independents, consultants, craftsmen, artists, musicians, freelancers, free agents, and self-employed people.

The majority of these companies are one-person enterprises …operate out of their homes; and many …have part-time help from a family member or friends.” (Courtesy of Lloyd Lemons in his Microbusiness Defined article).

The advantage of microbusinesses during a recession is the ability to be lean and flexible. The ability to quickly adapt to changing markets is a definite advantage that larger businesses and corporations do not have.

According to Dawn Rivers in her article on Small Business Trends, tells us that a  Jupiter Research report last year found that 89% of online businesses are microbusinesses. That research also found that microbusinesses had been quick to sign up for social networking sites but slow to use them, probably because many of us thought we didn’t have the time.

Social Media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter allow microbusinesses to build brand identity for very little money. Just an hour a day will go a long way to building brand – it is worth it to find the time.

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Blogging for Small Businesses

by blogmistress on February 25, 2009


It seems that a lot of companies are taking advantage of the opportunities offered by blogging and social media. This is not so true for small businesses. Only about 41 percent have their own interactive websites, according to a 2008 survey by small-business advisory service Warrillow & Co. Most small businesses understand the necessity of having a website but don’t take advantage of the e-commerce and marketing opportunities offered by the internet.

Small business blogs are a great way to connect with customers and drive traffic to your business website.  Here are a couple of ways to get started:

  • Be a reader of blogs. Read blogs specific to your line of business, see what others are saying. This is a great way to find inspiration to write. Comment on other’s blogs. Start having conversations with others in your industry. This is also a great way to keep up with what is going on in your industry.
  • Don’t worry about writing long articles full of several concepts. Brief articles are actually more likely to be read than long ones. If you have several concepts you want to cover, break them up into several articles.
  • Don’t make you blog and ad about you. Self-promoting blogs are not popular in the blogosphere. Give your readers useful information that they can use in their own lives. You have expertise that is valuable. Give your readers a reason to come to your blog.
  • Stay true to your businesses purpose. Don’t go on personal rants. If you are writing a blog about internet marketing, don’t start ranting about politics or traffic or, well . . . you get the picture. It is great to be human and show your own personality but don’t rant. Ranting may be fine for some blogs, but not, typically for a business blog.
  • Learn to write reasonably well. Read copyblogger for great tips on writing for business blogs.
  • Run spellcheck on all your posts.
  • Be consistent. I tend to read blogs that have regular posts. I tend not to read blogs that post sporadically, even from bloggers that I like. If  I can’t count on new material on a regular basis, even if it is only once a week (e. g. every Monday) I usually pass.
  • And . . . be committed. It takes a while to get into a flow and build traffic. Stick with it and it will pay off in the end.

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Blogging and Social Media

by blogmistress on February 23, 2009


I will be doing a seminar on blogging and social media in conjunction with ASU’s, Arkansas Small Business & Technology Development Center on March 20th on the ASUMH campus. You can register for this seminar here or by calling (870) 972-3517. This seminar will offer great information on how to use blogging and social media to promote your business and connect with your customers.

If you are in the area, be sure to plan to attend. Hope to see you there.

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How Effective is Social Media?

by blogmistress on February 19, 2009

chartofweek-02-17-09-lp

The chart above provided by Marketing Sherpa gives us some insight into what social media can do for us. The element I found most interesting was increasing website traffic. While you can see that social media is not as good for generating leads, the fact that it is effective at driving traffic to your website gives you a great opportunity to convert visitors to leads once they are on your site.

When visitors get to your website, be sure to make it easy for them to convert. Have contact forms easily available and easy to submit. Make sure your visitors feel comfortable giving you information. Have a privacy policy present that clearly tells your visitors that you will not sell or exchange their information and then don’t.

Another great reason to take advantage of the opportunities provided by social media: attracting potential customers to your website.

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Effective Social Media Tactics

by blogmistress on February 13, 2009

social-media


What is holding you back from using social media as a marketing tool? Is it the fact that measuring the ROI of social media is difficult? Consider this from Marketing Sherpa:

The most effective social media tactics are the most difficult to measure quantitatively. Don’t employ less effective tactics for the sake of measuring ROI. Consider the value of qualitative factors to gauge more effective tactics.

chartofweek-02-10-09-lp

“Inability to measure ROI” ranks as the second most significant barrier to social media adoption. But as the chart above shows, the ability to accurately measure ROI has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the tactic in the minds of marketers. “Advertising on blogs or social networks,” the tactic rated as the most accurately measured (32%), was also rated least effective (16%).

Everyone has an opinion on social media measurement, but nobody agrees. Like any tactic that is more aligned with PR than direct marketing, social media is difficult to measure quantitatively.

What can marketers do? Measure the value of the resulting conversations and relationships qualitatively. Do not focus on moment-in-time transactions, such as traffic hits.
Marketers obsessed with tracking social media results quantitatively are missing the point. They may find themselves employing much less effective social media tactics for the sake of measurability.

Take advantage of the great opportunities provided by social media.
Social media illustration by Matt Hamm via Flickr

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Best Marketing Practices?

by blogmistress on February 6, 2009

Blogging Cat

Blogging Cat




Recently, Hubspot did a great report based on a survey they did in late 2008. One of the questions they asked respondents was for their top best and worst marketing programs they’ve done to drive leads and sales over the past year. respondents frequently cited “blogs,” “SEO,” “websites,” “campaigns” and “social media” in their answers for best marketing programs. Check out the complete report on Hubspot. The report offers 3 key findings.

#1 Inbound marketing channels deliver a dramatically lower cost-per-sales lead than outbound channels.

#2 Blogs lead other social media categories in terms of importance to business.

#3 Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

Read the complete report for more great information for businesses at Hubspot.

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5 things part 5

by blogmistress on January 23, 2009



Last but not least, YouTube. The last of the 5 things.

  1. Blogs
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Facebook
  4. Flickr/del.icio.us
  5. YouTube

Go to YouTube and search for blendtec. This video on YouTube has had millions and millions of views. Search for something to do with your own business. Could you do a video for YouTube to promote your business?

If you have completed the 5 things, you have probably come up with dozens of ways to promote your business online. These are certainly not the only social media sites that you could use. If you want to look further, you could go to twitter.com, myspace.com, etc. to see if there is anything there you could use. I chose these 5 things because they are doable for me. You could be involved in every social media site out there but you would have to spend a lot of time to keep up with it.

Wondering if social media works? Look at the last elections. Candidates at all levels were connected in more ways with voters that they have ever been before. That is a lesson to take to heart. I hope this exploration has been beneficial to you and your business. Feel free to email me and let me know.

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