Social media experts will tell you, and they’ll make a pretty good case too, that it is the golden key to unlocking meaningful customer relationships and the gateway to surprising and delighting them over time. So how does social media do this? Well all it takes is to listen, be part of the conversation, curate great content, run native advertisements, and oh yeah, be transparent and authentic. Done and done. Well, wrong and wrong. Social media isn’t going to save…
Facebook: Can It Keep Growing?
Guest post by Ekaterina Walter (@ekaterina), a social innovator at Intel and the author of “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg” This question has been of great interest to investors since the 2012 IPO that saw the company valued at $100 billion. Facebook already has 1 billion users worldwide and 44% of all internet users have a profile. Facebook pages make up one in five page views on the internet. So is…
From the Big Screen to the Little Screen: The evolving relationship between TV and search
As a digital analyst, it’s my job to study how technology disrupts business markets and models. As an aspiring social scientist, I also study technology’s impact on culture and behavior. These two worlds are colliding with increasing velocity as each day passes. One of the trends I’ve been following over the last several years is the relationship between TV, smartphones, tablets and PCs. There’s no longer a doubt that we are becoming a society of multiscreeners. The reality is that…
Mitigating Risk in Social Media Engagement
Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK – Part 4 in a series There are a lot of articles out there about what to do for your company’s social media strategy. However, there is limited information about how to train the employees that are actually representing your company on social channels. And because social media is such an open and public place, your company is potentially at risk every time your employees engage in social campaigns. At ARAMARK, a multi-billion…
How Social Media is Sparking Organizational Transformation
It is with great pleasure that I share with you some exciting and hopefully helpful news. Salesforce and Altimeter Group recently collaborated on a special project to help executives understand the real impact of social media and in turn how to lead meaningful and lucrative transformation. The result is The Little Blue Book of Social Transformation, a free ebook that outlines 20 principles to lead change. It is available today as a complimentary download here. Now, the backstory… Executives are…
What Your Business Needs to Know About Facebook’s EdgeRank
Facebook recently introduced the ability for brands to increase reach for important posts and updates, but that reach comes at a cost. The prices varies depending on how many fans you have in your community. This new feature coincided with changes to the company’s Edgerank algorithm, which is how Facebook automagically filters posts in and out of your stream. Similar to how Google’s PageRank sorts results to better match your search intention, Facebook uses Edgerank to ensure that engagement is…
L.L. Bean: The importance of relationships in CRM and social in CSR
This is a story about the bond between a brand and a customer and the importance of relationships to do good things together… Guest post by Steven Gadecki, Director of Digital Marketing at SONY Pictures Television – Follow him on Twitter My story begins when my mother bought me an L.L.Bean backpack when I first started attending Broome Community College (BCC) in Binghamton, NY. Little did I know at the time that this backpack would become the catalyst for the…
Twitter passes 200 million monthly active users; no longer a fad
I wrote my first in-depth post covering Twitter in March 2007 saying that Twitter would be the “message heard around the world.” Since then, we learned that Twitter has become a human seismograph where news no longer breaks it tweets. We learned to speak in 140 characters or less. We’ve witnessed Tweets erupt into revolutions. Hashtags are now a way of life. And, we now live in a world where if it wasn’t tweeted, it didn’t happen. Life unfolds in a digital…
We are now a society of multi-taskers and multi-screeners
We are a nation of multi-taskers. As you read this, you’re either doing something else, or this is the “something else” you’re doing while your work on other projects or relax in front of another device. Not only are we multi-taskers, we’re also multi-screeners. Whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, PC/laptop, TV or something other device, we’re consuming, creating, and curating content across multiple devices, often at the same time. It seems that we’re rewiring our brains simply by how we…
The Human Algorithm: Redefining the Value of Data
The onslaught of real-time social, local, mobile (SoLoMo) technology is nothing short of overwhelming. Besides the gadgets, apps, social networks and appliances that continue to emerge, the pace of innovation is only outdone by the volumes of data that each produce. Everything we share, everywhere we go, everything we say and everyone we follow or connect with, generates valuable information that can be used to improve consumer experiences and ultimately improve products and services. While the amount of personal and…
