SplashCast: What Can Google+ Add To Social Media Marketing?
Google’s latest attempt at a social network is getting much better reviews than predecessors Google Wave and Google Buzz. But what can Circles, Hangouts and Sparks do for a company’s online branding efforts?
In this week’s SplashCast, host Renay San Miguel talks to Splash Media social media manager Adam Robinson about what there is to like in Google +, its business uses and how it sets the stage for a battle between the search giant and Facebook over “internet time ownership.”
The Impact of the Facebook Pages Revamp on Social Media Marketers
With over 500 million users and 30 billion pieces of content shared each month, Facebook has surpassed Google as the most visited site on the web. And now, Facebook is offering businesses a new way to approach their social media marketing with their new fan page design. Below are a few of the feature changes and how they will Facebook marketers.
Posting as the Brand
Change: Administrators can click on a button located on the right side of their admin page that says, “Use Facebook as a Page” and Facebook switches to a page focused site where page administrators can now post comments to other pages as their brand.
Impact: This enables businesses to interact with other companies and potential customers as their brand, increasing visibility throughout Facebook with influencers.
Using Facebook as a Brand
Change: When admins are using Facebook as their page, they will receive notifications anytime a new user “likes” their page, posts on their page, or comments on their page. The notifications show up in the upper-left corner of the site, just like they do with a normal Facebook account. Admins can also choose to receive e-mail notifications to let them know about new page activity.
Impact: This will enable admins not using a third party tool to keep track of activity to be more up to date on activity and take your responsiveness to the next level.
Facebook Brand News Feed
Change: You can now like pages as a brand as well as comment on their pages as your brand. Normally your news feed is populated with pages that you have liked as an individual. Now when you switch to using Facebook as a brand, the pages that you have liked as the brand will populate your news feed.
Impact: Networking just became as easy as pursuing your news feed for influential brands and commenting on the content that they are posting. Sharing as the brand is also available.
Marketing in today’s world is all about creating conversation. With the new features on Facebook pages, businesses can engage their communities and potential customers in worthwhile conversations, increasing their visibility on the most popular website in the world.
Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses: Stories You May Have Missed Feb. 18, 2011
Take heart: the weekend is almost here. But before the rest and relaxation really begins, consider these headlines from the past week regarding do’s and don’t's, case studies and can’t-miss-examples of social media marketing:
10 Laws of Social Media Marketing
Susan Gunelius, CEO of marketing communications firm KeySplash Creative, writes a great primer on what fundamentals to keep in mind when businesses start dipping their toes into the social media waters. “10 Laws of Social Media Marketing” is a must-read for companies on how they can boost their business by using these tools to help them connect to customers – and help them listen.
Google Vs. JC Penney
The tech blogosphere lit up following Sunday’s New York Times investigation into JC Penney and “black hat” search engine optimization tricks that ranked the retailer inordinately high on Google’s results pages for search terms on dozens of products like “dresses” and “bedding.” The company JC Penney hired to help it with SEO had successfully staged an end-run around Google’s search algorithms before being exposed by the newspaper and an internal Google link-spam team. For its part, JC Penney issued a response denying any knowledge of the tricks.
Nordstrom Buys HauteLook
Flash sale websites give consumers the chance to save big on high-end, A-list merchandise, but only for very brief periods of time and with very little warning. Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom – famous for customer service and a seemingly endless supply of women’s shoes – decided to expand its digital footprint by acquiring HauteLook, one of the top members-only flash sale companies, for $270 million.
Tasti D-Lite Serves Up Social Media Goodness
Many New Yorkers have a sweet tooth for Tasti D-Lite, the frozen dessert maker that started offering up franchises in 2008. A company executive took to the stage at a recent franchising convention to highlight how Tasti D-Lite is adding flavor to its connections with customers via Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and FourSquare.
Any opinions on these stories from the past week? How much damage did JC Penney sustain in its SEO controversy? Do you think Nordstrom can successfully transfer its reputation for customer service to its fledgling digital and social media efforts? Are there other examples of companies using social media platforms to narrow the distance between them and their customers? Feel free to share in our comments section, and have a great weekend!
The Social Media Minute for December 21, 2010
A Timely Treatment For A Timeless Christmas Message
Dallas-based Igniter Media practices what they preach by opening the lines of communication through videos like A Social Network Christmas.
What if Facebook, Twitter and YouTube existed at the time of the Nativity? That’s the premise of two popular YouTube videos making the rounds on social networks, and while both employ varying degrees of reverence, they’re also providing an early Christmas gift of sorts to businesses and marketers; they illustrate in a very compelling way the power of storytelling via social media/video.
The Digital Story of the Nativity created by the Portuguese digital marketing firm Excentric, is the more irreverent of the two versions; how else to explain a particularly sprightly version of “Jingle Bells” playing on the soundtrack as it imagines Joseph using Google for maps of Bethlehem, playing Farmville for cows and donkeys to populate a manger, and the three wise men using Amazon to buy their gifts for the Christ child? The baby Jesus’ picture is uploaded to Facebook, and the “likes” rapidly pile up.
The Social Media Minute for December 14, 2010
The 2010 Roundup: Lon Safko On The Year In Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Groupon, etc. The developments of the past 12 months in social media are starting to give Lon Safko an industrial-strength case of deja vu’.
“Watching the social media industry grow reminds me of exactly how the original computer industry grew in the 1980s,” says Safko, who should know: he’s an inventor, serial entrepreneur and author/editor of The Social Media Bible, an authoritative digital marketing primer for business executives now in its second edition. “In 1984 there was the Commodore, Texas Instruments, the Franklin, the Osborne, the Timex-Sinclair, Tandy, Amiga and of course the IBM Peanut, the Apple II and the Apple Macintosh. During the next decade the computer companies jockeyed for position until only two crossed the finish line, Apple and Microsoft (which really isn’t a computer company after all).”
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