Ten Preventable Social Marketing Mistakes

Terri Seymour ponders about 10 Preventable Social Marketing Mistakes. She writes:

The shadows of your mistakes will follow you. Image by Steve-h via Flickr

Social media have made a profound impact on the way businesses market their products and services. Did you think Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t last when they first came out?

Many of us did but boy were we wrong! Social media have taken most of the world by storm and if you own a business you definitely need to incorporate social media marketing in to your business plans.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn have grown faster than radio or television! Social media has made such a big impact on business more than 70% of companies now have a Facebook page.

If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook: Social Networks – Can We Survive Without Them?

Image at blaugh.com

In many previous postings I have been pondering on the importance of Social Media for business and how it will change our cooperation. Today I would like to discuss our dependence on such technologies:

I still remember the days in the mid-80′s when email addresses were written with exclamation marks and you had to know the path through the servers for the mail to arrive. E-mail was a “nice to have” gadget and nobody entrusted important information to it. All the “real” company and external information came per paper mail.

These days passed more quickly than I anticipated. It was in the late 90′s when a pharmaceutical company in my town had to send the employees home after an email outage. It had taken a mere 10 years for email to become an indispensable business tool.

If Facebook or Twitter would be down today there might not be a big stir in the business community except for the guys from the marketing department but in a few years a Social Media outage could very well bring business to a grinding halt.

Certainly if a blog site would go down we would feel the pain. Maybe not immediately but after a day or two. A Twitter outage could very well lead to more severe withdrawal symptoms.

Social Media Prism Infograph (Ethority.de)

Ethority created a rather beautiful graphic called “Social Media Prisma“– now available in its version 3.0. It unfolds the different categories of social media and shows some of the actual products in the different sections.

I think a classification like they provide will be helpful when discussing Social Media–especially in the German speaking part of this planet where people need to define a new paradigm before they will discuss it or embark on it.

Since the field of Social Media is expanding into new areas it is difficult or impossible to come up with a clear definition. If one provides such a definition one will have to revise it in regular intervals. An operational definition like the one provided in the infograph below is useful to introduce the field to industry.

Social Media Prism by ethority.de (click to magnify--and then click again to magnify further)

Social Media Around the World 2011

Interesting and inspiring slide set by Prof. Steven Van Belleghem of InSights Consulting: Social media around the world 2011.

From the transcript:

• What to expect from this presentation?
• 20 eye-catching facts about social media around the world.
• >1.000 facts & figures about socialmedia in more than 30 countries.
• Topics cover main adoption & usage,brand interactions, role of employees inusing social media and much more.

Will SuperCooperation Beat Command-and-Control in the Network Age?

Within the last couple of days I read two articles, a book review and a printed blog. Both were published at completely different places but reading them in a timely context made me see some interesting connection between the two.

Martin Novak (Image via Wikipedia)

The book review was about  ”SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. By Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield” (the link is to the Amazon page of the book with a content summary and reviews). The book marks a breakaway from the traditional picture of the “survival of the fittest” in today’s biology which often is wrongly interpreted to be the survival of the strongest individual (rather than species). Instead it explains the important role of cooperation in evolution. Here a quote from the book’s preface:

Cloud Computing: From Designer Clothes To Prêt-à-Porter

Image via Wikipedia

Today I read the June issue of the “Informatik Spektrum” (Organ of the German Informatics Society). It has a contribution by Prof. Gunter Dueck titled “Cloudwirbel” (cloud vortex). Gunter Dueck regularly publishes a column in this periodical under the header “DUECK-ß-INSIDE, many with a good sense of humor. Here a few of his thoughts on the future of cloud computing:

• Cloud Computing is growing extremely fast but the press is repeating the argument that it is only a hype and that it is not secure
• The textile industry adapted to the fact that washing machines will wash with 30˚, 60˚, 90˚C (in Fahrenheit this reads cold, warm, hot) and produces fabrics accordingly
• Industry around the car provided an opportunity for companies like Carglass, Pit-Stop etc. They pick the easy tasks from car maintenance (batteries, tires, exhaust, brake shoes, windows), offer these for a very competitive price and leave the complex stuff to the other garages
• We are observing similar trends in the medical field where semi-automatized labs perform immunizations, blood tests, dental checkups at low-cost
• IT has this kind of revolution still ahead of itself. IT professionals will fight this development since it will cost some of their jobs
• Industrialization will come to IT. Services will come with price tags. CFO’s will look at public clouds and ask why the own IT is so much more expensive
• Pay-per-use will allow to rent an application for one-time usage at a fraction of cost
• The cultural shock: IT will turn into a self-service store or mall offering apps with price tags

He finishes the article by quoting himself at a recent podium discussion: “Make up your mind and invest the extraordinary amount of EUR 10.- to order a full computer in a cloud and try it out. Make contact with this ‘extraterrestrial,’ feel how secure or insecure it feels once your data are up there. Feels similar to e-Banking? Stop with the Angst! Be prepared.”