Part 11 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…this series serves as the book’s prequel. There are those who believe social media is the catalyst for a new genre of business and that it will ultimately change how companies engage with customers. Others believe that for the organization to truly matter, it must adopt a culture of customer and employee centricity. Then there are those who study the evolution of consumer behavior and market…
What’s the R.O.I.? A Framework for Social Analytics
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein Say hello to my little friends, R.O. & I. Yes. Return on investment have become the bane of an entire new media industry. However, avoidance is not the answer. While the question of “what’s the R.O.I. of social media” is difficult to answer, it is necessary as it forces us to dig deeper. The result is maturity. This conversation is important as…
Report: Brands Pursue the Social Consumer
The Pivot Conference is unique in its focus of seeking and dissecting branding’s next revolution: The Rise of the Social Consumer. In October 2010, the inaugural event took place in New York, uniting brands, agencies, and industry experts to share insights, best practices and also explore the horizon for relevant emerging technologies and methodologies. At the end of 2010, the research team at Pivot conducted a survey among its 700-plus attendees to reveal 2011 challenges, opportunities and the plans to…
Report: Top 20 Brands on Twitter – April 2010
Twitter is a stream of incredible collective consciousness. Every day, people all over the world share their experiences through a truly personal lens, providing insight into the real-world experiences and observations that inspire conversations, define communities, and move markets – all in real time. Perhaps one of the most profound and largely untapped treasures in all of Social Media, Twitter indeed represents one of the world’s richest conversation mines. The openness of Twitter holds the information necessary to learn, adapt,…
Twitter Trends: Airline Hotlist August 2009
As Twitter adoption travels from the left to the right of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations Bell Curve, mainstream consumer behavior gathers momentum, manifesting into influential and telling market indicators. This invaluable behavior and sentiment eventually becomes deafening and without actively monitoring and analyzing this movement, we miss opportunities to learn, grow, and help. We need a prescribed lens into the real-time thoughts, observations, and experiences of real people, unfiltered, to make informed decisions and both lead and evolve along with…
The Decline of Traditional Advertising and the Rise of Social Media
Forrester Research released its five year forecast that estimates interactive marketing spending from 2009 – 2014. Forrester predicts that interactive marketing in the US will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend by 2014 and will include search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. More significantly however, overall advertising in traditional media will continue to decline in favor of less expensive, more effective interactive tools and services. Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk alerts marketing…
Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
You heard that right…no matter how much time we sink into our inbox trying to keep up with all that barrage of never-ending mail, a new report sent over by Nielsen (thanks Sandra Parrelli) claims that Social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online activity today. The report, “Global Faces and Networked Places,” features data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 and reveals some very interesting statistics worth noting. Here’s are the highlights: Two-thirds of the…
The Ties that Bind Us – Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
Credit Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu of the Social Computing Laboratory at HP Labs conducted an in-depth study of the relationships that power Twitter. The team recently released its report, “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope.” The abstract: Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the…
