Google+ is often misunderstood, Guy Kawasaki said during a recent webinar with SmartBrief. People sign up for it and expect it to be like Facebook, full of friends and family. And when it turns out that Google+ isn’t full of people they already know, they get discouraged and wander off. But the very thing that turns some people off of Google+ is what makes it so worthwhile for people who know how to use it correctly.
Facebook is like a very big party, where you know everyone already. But Google+ is a smaller, more intimate party filled with people you don’t know yet — but who have interesting things to say on a variety of topics. If Facebook is for friends and family, Twitter is for sharing thoughts and opinions and LinkedIn is for self-promotion — then Google+ is for talking about things you’re most passionate about with new and exciting people. (read more…)
Marketing never sits still for long. At a South by Southwest session, co-led by American Express OPEN and Skillshare, Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow gave his take on the shifting paradigm of marketing and how Facebook’s features are set to challenge the field all over again.
Highlights of Lazerow’s talk:
A brief history of marketing
Lazerow broke down the history of marketing into three buckets: Before 1996, 1996 to 2003 and 2003 to present. It’s no coincidence, he noted, that 2003 is close to when Facebook launched. He analyzed each era through the role of paid, owned and earned media. (Forrester offers an explainer of these terms.)
- In the earliest marketing era, traditional paid media dominated. Think print ads, radio, etc.
- With the rise of AOL and the Internet, by 1996, brands were investing in their own channels such as websites and e-mail marketing channels. Paid media remained a big player, and earned media was still a mere blip on the radar.
The social Web is divided into two spaces: the social graph and the interest graph. Your social graph is made up of your connections: your friends, pages you like, profiles you follow and content you see. Your interest graph, however, is focused on sentiment: what you actually like.
During the South By Southwest panel “Harvesting Consumer Content from the Social Web,” technology journalist Jolie O’Dell led marketing professionals AJ Vaynerchuk, Edward Boches, Farrah Bostic and Jeff Janer in a discussion of how the expression of intent is changing how consumers and brands use social media.
Too often, brands use social media to market to demographics rather than interests. The idea of grouping one’s personal interests into easily readable and well-displayed collections has been popularized by the hot social-networking site Pinterest. Applications such as GetGlue and even Foursquare can also provide accurate displays of what sparks a user’s interest. These platforms are opening doors for markers to tap not only a person’s social connections but also interest graph. (read more…)
Social media return on investment is a contentious, confusing subject for many people. But I’m going to answer all of your deeply held, esoteric social media ROI questions. I will share a scalable system for computing results you want from money you’re putting into your social media campaign, starting in the next paragraph. What? You don’t believe me? Good! You should be skeptical!
At a South by Southwest Interactive Festival session, Liz Strauss, Eric Swayne, Petri Darby, Matt Ridings and Ford Motor’s Craig Daitch pledged to lay bare this difficult topic. While I would have loved to get some hands-on examples of how to work with this often-dodged topic, I got no such answers. The name of the panel, “What’s So [Bleeping] Hard About Social ROI?,” was a little misleading — yet there was a ring of truth to it — because the session seemed to be a roundup of all of the reasons its so “bleeping” hard to find ROI and not a substantive session on how to actually grapple with this thorny issue. (read more…)
Everyone loves best practices, including me. After all, we love being told what works and what steps we should take to find success. But one of the things that really resonated at this year’s South by Southwest is the idea that businesses of all sizes need to think more about what’s “right for them,” not just what’s “right” by industry standards.
This, of course, is not breaking news. But it is really important. In the last few years, the world of technology has evolved rapidly, but the world of social media is actually stabilizing. There are tons of case studies. The things that work are being enhanced with innovations, and the ones that don’t are fading away. However, there really are no rules that everyone needs to live by, for better or worse.
For example, during the session “Food Trucks Share Social Media Tips,” the panel was asked whether it’s OK to outsource your social media voice — a topic that is often debated. (read more…)
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