“Businesses that use the Web are growing 15% faster than those that do not. That’s the reality now,” said Susan Sobbott, president of American Express OPEN, in closing her lunchtime panel discussion at The New York Times Small Business Summit.
It was tough talk for attendees who still aren’t using social media as part of their marketing strategy. Three companies with representatives on the panel showed that social media can be key to small-business success. (read more…)
SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week we asked, Does curation play a role in your company’s social-content strategy? The results:
- Yes: 68%
- No: 32%
Nearly 70% of you said curation plays a role in your social-content strategy. Without sounding like a naysayer, I’d like to offer a few words of caution on the topic.
First and foremost, if you curate because you don’t have enough time to create, you are minimizing the value of creation and the power it has to give your company and brand a voice and a position in the marketplace. When faced with the choice between curating and creating, in terms of prioritizing and allocating time, until all your basic creation needs are met, curation should almost always come second.
Next, by sharing other people’s information (curated) in place of your own (created), while you may be providing value to your audience by becoming a valuable content resource, at the same time, you may be harming your ability to differentiate yourself. (read more…)
“I didn’t know what to do, so I just Googled it.”
The lead corporate social strategist at one of the top hospitality brands in the world pulled us aside and in a hushed tone confided, “Honestly, I didn’t know what to do or how to write one, so I just Googled the term ‘enterprise social RFP.’ ”
It might be shocking, but it’s more common than you think.
Large brands are starting to think about doing social at scale — the way that large, global brands can have a personal relationship with hundreds of thousands or millions of customers.
“Playtime is over”
As Esteban Contreras, social media manager at Samsung USA, said, when it comes to social, “Playtime is over.”
He’s not the only one who has figured this out.
At Sprinklr, we conducted nearly 200 interviews — see them on SprinklrTV — with heads of social at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Abbott Laboratories and General Motors, as well as industry thought leaders such as Joe Jaffe, David Armano and Matt Dickman. (read more…)
This year’s Summer Olympics in London are looking to be the most social thus far. With the opening ceremonies about a month away, social media platforms are creating new ways to increase user engagement throughout the games. Facebook for example, has launched what they hope will be a one-stop shop for fans looking for information about the Olympics.
Facebook teamed up with the International Olympic Committee to create a Social Media Stadium or hub from which Facebook users can easily access fan pages for teams, specific athletes and sports that will be a part of this summer’s games. Athletes such as Michael Phelps and Hope Solo, and teams like Japan, Rwanda, Mexico and, of course, the U.S. National Team are already a part of this hub for users to follow current standings, information and more on fan pages. The Olympic Games page alone already has 2.8 million fans.
In this week’s episode of “Future of Engagement,” Murray Newlands takes a closer look at Facebook’s launch of the 2012 Olympics hub and talks about what you can learn from Facebook’s example for your brand. (read more…)
At Farmers Insurance, agents are seen as its competitive advantage. Agents get know policyholders, create relationships with them and are there in times of need.
Farmers’ Ryon Harms was tasked with helping this army of agents extend these real-world relationships to Facebook. The result was a detailed training program that helped agents understand the fundamentals of Facebook, taught them how to create genuine engagement and showed them how to work the tool into their already-busy day.
At our recent BlogWell in San Francisco, Harms walked us through exactly how Farmers did it. A few of his big ideas:
- Teach them how to fish. Philosophically, Farmers decided early on that it would focus on teaching agents how to use social media, rather than do it for them at the corporate level. One of the biggest reasons? Analytics showed that individual agents at the local level were seeing significantly higher engagement than what Farmers could possibly do at the corporate level.
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