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. Read the rest of this entry »
Michel Ruggaber (@miruggaber) pointed me to a useful article discussing Social Media sites for business: Top 10 Social Networking Sites For Business (Social Networking Marketing Stress Relief)
I don’t necessarily agree with the entire list but do agree with the top five. I am quoting the top five from the article (my remarks in Italics):
Many are aware of Google Analyticsto measure web site traffic on their own pages. But setting the tool up correctly is quite involving and many give up half way through. Google analytics, once you succeeded in setting everything up correctly will send you a weekly detailed report on the visits to your site.
Google Analytics. Image at Flickr
Chris Thompkins published an article on ezinearticles.com which describes how to use the URL shortenerbit.ly to monitor clicks on links of one’s pages. You will have to register on bit.ly and add a button to your web browser. After that you can just click on that button when you are visiting the page in question to see the statistics.
But if you use wordpress.com (like I do here) then you have all this built-in in the dashboard and you won’t have to deal with additional buttons and registrations. I anyway recommend using wordpress instead of a “normal” home page using the blog for actual news and to share ideas and to use the static pages for the “about” and “services”, “contact”, …
What is your experience? Which tools do you use for monitoring and tracking? What are your recommendations?
In case you don’t know it, without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions.
Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. The network now allows advertisers to use pictures and names of other users in their network of connections who have recommended or followed that brand.
A water filled bottle brings light into a windowless slum dwelling. Illac Diaz (left). Image source: AFP; as pictured in the article of the Basler Zeitung
As recently reported in our local newspaper in Basel (Plastikflaschen für den Klimaschutz – News Wissen: Technik – bazonline.ch) philanthropist Illac Diaz from the Philippines is using simple low-tech discarded plastic bottles filled with water to bring light into the windowless dwellings of the poor. During daytime such a bottle can illuminate a dark room with the brightness equal to a 55 W incandescent bulb.
Diaz received positive feedback from UNO: Compared to a normal bulb his plastic bottle saves 17 kg CO2 per year.
Diaz was not the original inventor of this applied science technology, it was first used by the Brazilian Alfredo Moser some 10 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Corey Eridon has some advice on mistakes to avoid and she warns not to be sloppy about Social Media. She writes in her blog on hubspot.com:
“What makes the following social media mistakes particularly sloppy is that they cost little time and no money to fix, have tremendous returns, and as such are huge misses to your overall social media strategy. Stop being sloppy, and make sure you’re not making any of these 10 social media mistakes (+1 for good luck).” Read the rest of this entry »
Now that we learned to make the occasional backup of the files on our computers using external hard disks and — the audacious ones among us — using cloud services (BTW: check out Wuala for backup. Files get encrypted on your machine and will be packet-distributed to their storage computers. Like DropBox, just safer) here comes the next backup pattern: Backing up your Social Media.
Gartners CEO Gene Hall warned the CIO’s of the four winds that blow at the CIO simultaneously. CIO’s will have to bundle up to weather the coming storm.
The four winds Hall talked about are four new disruptive technologies, which will change profoundly the IT landscape and the life of CIO’s. These are:
Social Media — with 1.8 bio users (20% of world population) it is out of its infancy. High time that CIO’s look into integrating this into their enterprise IT infrastructure
Mobility – the explosive dissemination of iPhones, iPads, Android devices sends a clear signal. “Bring your own device” is becoming rather the rule than the exception. Customers and partners will access your systems more and more on these mobile devices. The development of apps for the mobile devices will be a factor of four above the development for desktop systems
Cloud Computing – not yet mainstream but with the mega players starting their offerings as cloud services this technology will prevail. Cloud computing is the industrialisation of IT.
New Analytics – the data warehouse is dead, long live the diverse content management systems with their searchability. Read the rest of this entry »
Scott McNealy's Twitter profile photo. (Credit: Twitter.com)
The former CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. (now part of: http://www.oracle.com) is the creator of a new startup. It provides a new social media service called Wayin. The service launched on October 5th and is a application in the realm of opinion polls.
Users of the network can vote on polls but also can easily create their own polls. Polls present themselves as an image with the questions superimposed (see example at right). Polls will mostly be on current shows in Sports and TV but also on other issues. Read the rest of this entry »
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)
Companies use social media as marketing tools. But who wants to measure their success, needs management and monitoring tools.
Many companies have begun to use Social Media. They serve not only as an internal communication platform, but also as marketing, advertising and sales tools. According to the U.S. consulting and market research group Altimeter Group in 2014, about 90 percent of all businesses in North America and Western Europe will use tools or software suites for managing social media activities and success control (monitoring).
Astrid Næsgård is 79 years and is familiar with the Internet as a communication channel. To the left SINTEF researcher Kristine Holbø. (Photo: Thor Nielsen). From: http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2011/september/297432
“Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg probably never had this in mind when he came up with the phenomenally popular social network, but researchers are developing a type of “Facebook Light” for the elderly and people who have dementia. This approach will provide these individuals with a new way to maintain social contact and a better quality of life. Read the rest of this entry »
The Maze of Social Media (picture from the article)
“Social media has become an integral part of modern society.
There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries.
There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there.
There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends.
It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.”
In this article, Cameron Chapman reviews the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day. Read the rest of this entry »
Taking things in your own hands. (Source: Forbes.com)
The social might of the uprising in the Middle East is now moving towards your company. Empowered individuals can make themselves heard. Our institutions are not prepared for this new social power.
Detail from the (large) infograph. Click to see the entire graph.
SearchEngineJournal published a nice infographic on the current growth of Social Media that I would like to share with you.
“Say what you will about the tidal wave that is social media: it’s over-hyped, a fad halfway through its 15 minutes, that <insert social network, platform, app> surely won’t be around in a few years’ time.
“But take a look below at the steep curve of the user growth rate in all age ranges and demographics, and the continuing pervasiveness of social networking into every facet of work, play and life in general. It’s hard to argue that social media hasn’t changed forever how we interact and connect online. See for yourself: (click image to enlarge)” (Quote from SearchEngineJournal)
You can find some other nice examples of infographics further down in this blog. Which is your favorite infographic out there?
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Posted by Hellmuth Broda 
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