Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. +1 us on Google Plus. Sound familiar? It’s an all too familiar request that consumers face everyday. But what are businesses doing to help convince customers why they should do so? The answer is not as pervasive as you might imagine or hope to expect. In fact, I believe that “why?” is the least asked question by businesses in social media today. The questions businesses should be asking, even before they create…
Stop Talking About Yourself
Guest post by Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella), social media scientist at HubSpot One of the easiest ways to explain social media to newcomers is to liken it to a networking or cocktail party. The behaviors that will make you the life of the party (or a pariah) will have the same effect in social media. And we all know how painful it is to listen to someone at an event just talk about themselves all night long. I analyzed a number…
The Rise of the Connected Customer and the New Era of Relevance
It’s not a widely kept secret, but customers do indeed keep companies in business. While businesses have long invested in improving customer relationships, the time has come to think beyond efficiencies and automation and examine new opportunities to rethink customer experiences overall. Why? Customers are more connected than ever before. The role they play has exploded beyond transactions and is now influencing the transactions of others as well as contributing to the brand experience at levels never before seen. It’s…
Study: Will You Abandon Facebook in Favor of Google+?
The question seems premature or perhaps over dramatized, but I ask it with all sincerity. Whether the answer is yes or no or if the answer is not yet within grasp, think about the question at any level you wish and try to answer it. It is the process of thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook and Google Plus where you discover what each network means to you and why and how you will divide your time and…
Report: The Rise of the Social Advertising
To download the full Pivot report, please click here… We are entering the beginning of the end of the destination web as we have known it. Consumers increasingly spend time in social networks and less in their email inboxes and visiting traditional websites. As such, brands continue to race to social media sites in the hopes of connecting with consumers when their attention is focused on conversations relevant to those brands. Part of the challenge however, is earning the attention…
Dispelling the Darkness with Brand Journalism
Guest post by Kyle Monson, a former technology journalist and editor at PC Magazine, is Content Strategy Director at JWT. Follow him on Twitter @kmonson You probably already know this, but we marketers are the bad guys in the battle of good versus evil. One commonly employed metaphor—“The Dark Side”—is particularly apt: we hunt down Jedi masters and destroy Alderaan. The top guys in marketing might refer to themselves as ninjas, but siths is a better descriptor, depending on whom…
Social Media is not Going to Save Your Business
To truly see opportunities within social media requires viewing the consumer landscape through a different lens… Social media is enjoying yet another gust beneath its wings. Google Plus is rekindling the love affair of social networking among the early adopters and mavens who friended their way to higher Klout scores and also social network fatigue. The numbers of social network users are soaring well past 10 figures. Even celebrities such as Bono, Justin Timberlake, Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga et al,…
The Top 10 Marketing Sites for Social Media Marketing Trends
Recently, the Pivot Conference team set out to learn more about the state of social advertising and the future ahead by conducting an industry survey of 230 brand managers, executives, and marketing professionals. We will release the full report during the week of July 25th. Not all of the insights we learned will make it into the final report. However, I will share a few interesting findings as they come up starting with this one… The Top Marketing Sites for…
Google will not run Circles around Facebook, but it gets a +1
While there are already countless articles about Google+ and many more sharing up-to-the-minute statistics to emerge from the burgeoning network, I reserved my thoughts until now. I needed time to think about it. Part FriendFeed, part Google Buzz, part Facebook, part Google.com and all of its properties, Google Plus represents a fresh approach to social engagement not seen at this level since the early days of Twitter. In the U.S., we have only a few top traditional TV networks, CBS,…
This is the time to go your own way
I was recently asked to write the foreword for Social Media Geek-to-Geek by Rick & Kathy Schmidt Jamison. I was delighted to help and as always, I requested to publish the foreword here when the book was released. Now that the book is available on Amazon, I’m excited to share the foreword with you here… When I’m asked to research and present success stories and best practices in social media, I often ask a bit more about what it is…
