The 5 most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media this past week:
- Loyal customers tweet back against Tropicana redesign
- 3 online communities helping retailers survive downturn
- Make the most of traffic surges
- Big brands continue to wrestle with social media
- Social network applications set to take off in 2009
Image credit, iStock (read more…)
If it stops when you stop paying for it, it’s advertising. If it keeps going, it’s word-of-mouth marketing. When thinking about whether you should engage in word-of-mouth marketing or whether to go with traditional advertising, you’re really talking about when to spend money.
Three differences:
- Word of mouth allows for “test first, spend later.” Testing a campaign or a message on Facebook is free and takes a few minutes. If it takes off, then you know it’s worth investing in.
- Speed to launch. You can start a new word-of-mouth strategy in less than an hour, whereas advertising requires lots of planning, research, and coordination.
- Staff involved. One person can effectively reach lots of your fans and influencers to engage in conversations about you, while advertising often requires multiple departments and outside agencies.
FriendFeed is an online service that allows users to share photos, music, news, videos, and Web sites with their social network. 
While users can manually post on FriendFeed, a unique component of the service is that it aggregates activity from sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Tumblr, and Twitter and alerts friends of that activity. For example, when I upload new photos to my Flickr account an update is sent out on FriendFeed saying “Dana published 5 photos on Flickr.”
FriendFeed can also act as a central location for blog, Twitter and social network activities. In fact, there is a handy Facebook application that allows users to operate Friendfeed through Facebook. Ultimately, this makes Friendfeed a main hub for sending out updates and working with many social networking accounts.
FriendFeed currently supports user activity on 60 Web sites.
Photo Credit, Thomas Hawk (read more…)
What happens when your viral campaign becomes an online greatest hit? It sounds like one of those good problems to have, but in an article for the Boston Globe, Brian Steinberg touches on what could become a legacy of the craze for viral campaigns — unwanted permanency.
One example — Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, online since 2006, still jumps, boogies and sits on command. Reebok’s Run Easy has transformed from a shoe promo to a place for members to swap running tips and routes.
These are both great success stories, but what happens when a viral offering means more to users than to its sponsor? Social media evangelists say it’s critical to cede control to users — but does that entail continuing to support content that has outlived its utility as a marketing tool? Or does continuing consumer interest guarantee marketing utility?
Photo Credit, Dave McClure (read more…)
You’d think Twitter is a miracle drug from the way us social media experts talk about it. It is helpful, it’s a great marketing tool, and it’s fun — but it’s far from essential. If you use it well, you’ll get a lot of benefit from it. If you choose not to use it, that’s just fine. The Earth will continue to rotate and the recession will get no worse. Just remember that if you use it, you are joining a personal conversation between real people. If you jump in with a lot of self-promotional sales, you’re going to look like an idiot and turn people off.
What to do:
- Keep it personal. You need to respond to other people, offer up some interesting links, and be part of the conversation. If all your posts are about you–no one is going to follow you.
- Repost your stuff. Link to all your own blog posts and interesting things you write.
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