Jon Swartz is a veteran technology reporter based in Silicon Valley currently covering emerging and disruptive tech at USA Today. This is the second time we’ve invited him to Revolution. His take on news trends is less about hype and more about how technology impacts everyday business and society. Sometimes technology is the solution as much as it is part of the problem. For consumers, the ability to use mobile, social and the web is not only enlivening real-time experiences,…
Culture Shock: Culture’s Impact on Social Marketing and Business
Guest post by Ekaterina Walter, a social media strategist at Intel. She was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Follow her on Twitter Culture is one of the largest components of how we communicate: not just how we say something but how we choose the tools we use to get a message across. This is as true for social media as it was for the telegraph. For example, if you…
Engagement ain’t nothing but a number – why 1% isn’t good enough
The headline calls attention to everything that’s wrong with how businesses measure engagement in social media today. Businesses that invest any level of marketing resources in networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like (get it?) are being groomed to focus on soft metrics instead of the relevant activity that signals the strength and worth of a community. By weighing conversations, interactions, and views, businesses are fed raw numbers that demonstrate KPIs but they do not offer the insights…
Pinterest Rivals Twitter in Referral Traffic
To those of you who lead “the Pinteresting life,” you’ve contributed to a phenomenon that is certainly putting its clicks where the hype is. By that I mean, Pinterest is a two-year old cultural sensation that is borderline causing dependency among its users and the rabid audiences they’re developed. This rapid fire network has pinned itself to a rocket with estimated unique viewership ascending 429% from September to December 2011…and I’m not even sure if the sky’s the limit here….
The New, New Twitter and What It Means to You and Your Business
The new, new Twitter is upon us and while some of you already have access to it, others will have to wait up to three weeks. I’m not one to write about new features or products as they’re released. But I would like to take some time to review why this version of Twitter is important to you and your business. Twitter has undergone nothing short of a complete redesign…again. The new experience offers a much needed simplification. After all,…
Why Your Business Should Be on Google+
Guest post by Matt Polsky, social media director for Veterans United Home Loans By now, many of us have already started setting up our Google+ business pages, and have noticed that there’s nothing overly special about these business pages yet, since they currently lack a vanity URL, have no setting for multiple admins and closely resemble a personal page. However, they will be connected back to Google’s search engine in a way that removes the noise made by competitors. Towards…
Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows
This is part two in a short series to introduce The End of Business as Usual…originally posted on Harvard Business Review (edited) There’s an old saying that carries renewed meaning these days: Give the people what they want. Brands are furiously creating profiles in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the hopes of building engaging communities with customers and giving people what the brands think they want. The main activity in this effort is to spur consumers to…
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…
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,…
New Media and the Future of Business
I was recently interviewed by Israel’s BuzzInNews about new media and business. The conversation was translated from Hebrew to English, to share with you here as well. The discussion explores the evolution of social media in business from attention economics to B2B to ROI and concluding with a discussion of the brewing cold war between Google and Facebook. As an expert on New Media, could you provide an insight to what the difference is between New Media and Social Media?…
