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.

Metcalfe’s Law and Marketing

Ian Dainty recently published an article on EzineArticles.com on Metcalfe’s Law and Marketing. He muses:

Mr Metcalfe (Photo credit: DanieVDM)

If you aren’t using Social Media to its utmost, and posting messages at least once a week, you’re missing out on thousands of potential clients. And the more messages you post, the more your network, and their network, gets to know you and believe you and trust you, because they see you know what you are talking about.

Metcalfe’s Law claims the potential value of a communications network increases exponentially with its size.

Specifically, it proposes that for a network with ‘n’ endpoints (think of these as devices, or people), the inherent usefulness of this network is on the order of ‘n’ times ‘n’ or n².

Are you clueless when it comes to integrating social into your website?

Image via Wikipedia

A recent non-scientific poll done by Jeremy Victor, which he published on SmartBlog is titled “Are you clueless when it comes to integrating social into your website?.”

He reports as results:

• 42.86%: “Our website has “Follow/Fan Us” links to our social presences but with no strategy”
• 22.08%: “There is no integration between our website and our social presence”
• 18.18%: “Our website is a fully integrated component of our social activity, with the goal being to bring users from the social site”
• 12.99%: “Our website displays activity from our social presence and has Follow/Fan Us links”
• 3.90%: “Our website has “Follow/Fan Us” links that encourage users to promote our brand after following”

He concludes that:

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)