“Twitter Revolution” Thrust Back Into the Political Spotlight as Turkish Protesters Take to Social Media

When we wrote “Twitter Revolution” we were talking about marketing and business. We knew the world was changing, but had no idea we were coining a term that would be used for political uprisings around the world.

I vote to use the term “Arab Spring” 🙂

Another Twitter Revolution?

Over two years after the Arab Spring began, Turkey is in the midst of its own interpretation as a weekend of anti-government demonstrations spread across the country, ignited by opposition to construction of a shopping mall in a popular Istanbul park and exacerbated by traditional Turkish media’s lack of coverage.Protests spread to half of Turkey’s 81 provinces by Sunday with the Turkish Doctors’ Association reporting at least 1,700 people injured in Istanbul and Ankara.

Much like the movement that swept across Egypt, Libya, Syria and dozens of other countries in the region, social media, especially Twitter, has played an integral role in the organization of demonstrations and the spread of ideals.Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan called the protesters an “extremist fringe” even as 10,000 demonstrators called on his government to resign. The increasingly authoritarian PM singled out Twitter saying, “the best examples of lies can be found there,” and called social media “the worst menace to society.”

Erdogan’s harsh crackdowns on press freedom in Turkey and his desire for a more tightly-controlled Internet are now fueling the very communication tools he had hoped to quell. “Erdogan does not listen to anyone any more,” said Koray Caliskan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University, The Guardian reports. Similar occurences feuled the Arab Spring, which saught out to conquer widespread censorship of the mass media and the internet, especially social media. Recently, Jordan’s prime minister spoke out about the changes that have came about since the uprising that began in late 2010. “The past few years have been very crucial to our region, because the Arab Spring has opened new horizons and created more demands” for wider freedoms of expression and the press, reports the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Gas masks appear to be standard issue for photographers in #Turkey. bit.ly/18HBrLN twitter.com/nycjim/status/…

In a clear example of media censorship, the state-controlled TV stations and newspapers ignored coverage of the protests, which are the largest and most violent protests the country has seen in years. “The Turkish media have embarrassed themselves,” Caliskan said. “While the whole world was oadcasting from Taksim Square, Turkish television stations were showing cooking shows. It is now very clear that we do not have press freedom in Turkey.”

See full story on brandchannel.com

The Next Generation of Data Analysis

In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it’s months away, not years.

Today is the start of IBM’s SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the event. Last night, I spent some time chatting with Sandra Zoratti, author of Precision Marketing, Stratigent‘s Bill Bruno and Triberr‘s Dino Dogan.

I shared with them how I was first exposed to real data driven marketing online in the early 1990s. I was managing banner ad placement ads on sites like Yahoo!, Excite and AltaVista for a consumer focused software company.  We could measure by each ad creative and placement how much usage and revenue they generated from their software download. From the start we developed hooks into the software to marry up the acquisition data. We could then ask the analysts to run queries for us and send us Excel spreadsheets. We used them to decide where to keep investing in banner ads.

So, of course, when Jeffrey and I started focusing more of our time on online businesses we expected people to do similar things.  Where we ever surprised!

Excel became the de-facto tool for analysts. Do you remember the days of running web logs files in excel to analyze them? This was before tools like WebTrends log analyzer became popular and of course well before any of the javascript based web analytics tools even launched. Excel is still a great tool for analysts as Chief Evangelist for Bing Ads, John Gagnon has shown in his last couple of columns. It is not however, the best tool to share data  and collaborate with the entire organization. How many times have you seen Excel spreadsheets and charts go straight from the inbox to some digital black hole, never to be used again?

This past week, we saw data visualization platform Tableau, enjoy a  successful IPO. I love what you can do with their platform, but  it still doesn’t pack the punch it needs to in order to get an organization to act on the data. As Robbie Allen, the CEO of Automated Insights points out ”most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results.”

See full story on bryaneisenberg.com

5 As of Social Media Measurement

There are literally gigabytes of people fighting about the ROI of social media. The truth is, there are certainly outcomes that we should all be measuring to ensure that we are using social media measurement in the most effective way possible.

I think of social media measurement as a continuum of measures. Consider using one or more of these in your measurement strategy.

Activity: This measure is all about what YOU do. Do track your activities and benchmark them against results but don’t stop there. Many agencies tend to focus their reports on activities they completed for a client, but they should not be considered results measurement.

Attention. This measure is all about reach or “opportunities to see.” They say that any publicity is good publicity, but as we all know in this 24/7 news-hungry world not ALL attention is good attention. The easiest thing to measure in social media is attention. You can see how many visits your page has, how many were unique and how many were repeat or new visitors. Attention looks at volume, number of friends and reach.

Awareness. This measure is all about engagement with you. It means that people are starting to become aware that you exist in social channels. It doesn’t mean they will take any action beyond this, or that there will be any appreciable business results.  Awareness measures include Likes, mentions, share of voice, referrals and % of followers engaged.

Attitudes. This measure is all about conversation about you. You can measure online sentiment to get a crude idea of where you stand with the community over time, mostly positive, mostly negative and mostly neutral. However, sentiment doesn’t give a full view and can be significantly skewed if you use automated sentiment tools. You can look also at customer satisfaction surveys and cross tab with their involvement with social media sources, loyalty over time, and repeat visits to get an idea of attitudes. The gold standard is conducting a relationships survey.

See full story on zoeticamedia.com

Stop Building Websites by Building a Smart Site

A Smart Site Takes The Drudgery Out of Your Visitors Experience

The mission of digital-telepathy is to make great design..  a smart site accessible to anyone by creating new standards that improve how people interact with and create digital design. From websites to mobile apps, TVs and beyond, we’re committed to making experiences that define the future of the screen interface. Though there is plenty of ground to cover to accomplish our mission, the higher we push the standards for publishers and designers, the better the experience becomes for all web users.

We’re starting our mission with a focus on websites. Still based on print paradigms with archaic, link-driven tables of contents and page structures, today’s websites don’t capitalize on the native opportunities of the digital medium they live in. They are disjointed and kludgy, hampering the user’s ability to accomplish his or her goals. And yet, we don’t need to look any further than our handheld devices to see that user experiences don’t have to be this way. Fluid and guided, mobile apps are intuitive, providing visceral feedback that satisfies and keeps us coming back. They are the antithesis of most web experiences.

So what’s preventing the website from becoming as enjoyable and effective as mobile apps? Thanks to app-like interactions made possible by JavaScript and CSS3, faster connection speeds, and responsive design, there is no technical reason that websites can’t evolve. The only remaining barrier to a great experience is exceptional web design. Why? Because it’s historically been incredibly expensive. But if we think in terms of the experience and forget what we know about traditional web design, we can free ourselves of the expensive corporate site design time sink, and find a way to ing intuitive design to website owners everywhere.

As designers of the Web, we need to rally around a common cause of democratizing web-based experiences as seamless, story-driven, goal-based, intuitive and viscerally satisfying as their mobile ethren.

Think of the last landing page you encountered. Like the car salesman that wanders over when you just want to owse, landing pages relentlessly hound you to turn over your information. When and is traded completely for conversion, there is no positive or lasting experience to be found.

See full story on dtelepathy.com

Google Operators Guide [Infographic]

The best tricks of any trade are the ones that enable you to do a job in a shorter amount of time than it would have taken you if you hadn’t known those tricks.

In other words, any capable professional in any specific business has one or two tricks up their sleeve that enable them to make their jobs (and thus, their lives) easier. And being a search marketer is not any different. In fact one of the first things any good marketer who works in the SEO or content marketing space should familiarize themselves with is the use of basic Google operators so they can drill down into a website with a minimal amount of third party tools.

For example: if you wanted to quickly and easily tell a person how many pages of their website are in the google index and how they are being displayed you would simply punch this simple command into google:

site:wpromote.com

and Google would hand you back something like so:

A working knowledge of Google operators is useful for everyone who operates in the online space. From public relations professionals looking for specific journalists, to SEO professionals checking indexation, to content marketers looking to take inventory of how big a conversation is online, these are extremly useful little commands and they can make your life a lot easier if you know how to use them.

It was for just that reason that we’ve put together a cheat sheet of our favorite Google operators that we use on a day-to-day basis here at Wpromote, and even some real world applications that you can apply to your business or marketing efforts if you are so inclined.

Presented By Wpromote

Google Operators Guide

See full story on wpromote.com

5 Tools For a Social Media Makeover

If you aren’t seeing the ROI you are looking for, it’s time for a social media makeover.

Follow the tips from this blog and I can guarantee you’ll have more profitable social media.

social media makeover

social media makeover

5 Tool for a Social Media Makeover

By Ian Cleary, Contributing Columnist to {grow}

In the world of social media it’s important to step back and review what you have done and implement changes on a regular basis. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time for a makeover.  Here are five cool tools you can use that just might deliver some new “oomph” to your social media efforts:

On average only 16 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates.  Suck!  This is a well-known number but something you should completely ignore because there’s no reason why you should be average!

But even if 50 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates there’s still the other 50 percent that don’t see them at all. And on top of this are they actually reading them? How often do you read all the updates on your Facebook page?

One strategy for ensuring more of your fans see your updates is converting your fans to eMail Subscribers.  This means you can communicate with them over both channels and have a better chance of reaching them.

You can add a customized application to your Facebook page with a provider such as Heyo, Tabsite or a run a competition using Shortstack and start building those email subscribers.

Social media is not necessarily all about sales but I’m sure you’d like to see some action from the updates you make.  This may be visits to your website where you get people spending time there, subscribing to your email list or buying your products or services.

See full story on businessesgrow.com

How Do You Calculate ROI?

How do you calculate ROI (return on investment) for social media marketing?

Start by understanding the process, and knowing your goals

How to Calculate ROI

How to Calculate ROI

How Should You Calculate ROI?

Marketing is increasingly metrics-driven. This has been a terrific evolution for our profession because it enables us to sit at the C-suite table with equal legitimacy and credibility, not to mention the fact that we operate far more efficiently than before. Enterprise executives love anything that demonstrates achievement in concrete terms. But the discussion of which metrics to use, how to define them and when to use them is far from finished.

Marketing return on investment (marketing ROI), otherwise known as return on marketing investment (ROMI), seems like a straightforward concept that borrows from our ethren in finance. But if you peel this onion you’ll uncover a raft of questions that marketers frequently struggle with. For example:

We’re not going to play Solomon and make those choices for you, but we do want you to consider what goes into those numbers and how you should represent them to your peers in the C-suite. Sometimes you will be ordered by non-marketers to assemble those numbers in a particular way, and your options will be limited or nonexistent. In other companies, no one will have a clue. But whatever you do, transparency is your best ally. Spend plenty of time explaining your underlying assumptions and soliciting feedback.

Our own working definition is this: Take the revenue attributable to marketing efforts and divide it by marketing spend, which includes the costs associated with advertising and effort. We obviously want positive results greater than 1.

Another distinction to keep in mind: The investment portion of the calculation is not investment as we understand it in other business functions (plants, inventories, etc.).Unless marketing is buying some kind of durable infrastructure, everything is expensed. But here’s what is most important: Marketing expenditures should be understood as risk. For some people, this may be a distinction without a difference. In reality this implies that past experiences are more important for marketing decisions than it is for other functions. As an aside: The nature of risk and managing it appropriately are topics that are not well-understood by most people. This can make the discussion even more difficult.

In March, 2012 the Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association undertook a study of 243 marketing executives to understand if and how they use ROI measures for budgeting. The study found that 57% do not use ROI in their budgeting process. Instead, 68% base their decisions on historical spending and 28% “go with their gut”.7% don’t use anything (except, perhaps, avado).

We are not surprised by these numbers. But there’s no one to blame. Marketing measurement science (for lack of a better term) is still in its infancy, even though we speak frequently about being “metrics-driven” and the evolution of our thinking over the last decade or two. There are lots of good ideas out there, but our profession has a long way to go before we reach even a modicum of standardization. The chaos notwithstanding, you still need to emace ROI calculations to show your bosses and peers that you are taking seriously the need to demonstrate marketing’s value to the enterprise.

See full story on leadformix.com

4 Best Practices for Brands Sharing Content for Twitter Yahoo News

Twitter Yahoo

Yahoo now including Twitter in News

 

Twitter Yahoo Partnership will Bring Tweet into Yahoo Newsfeed

By Victoria Harres, Published May 17, 2013

Last month a single 61 character tweet (12 words as a matter of fact) caused the S&P 500 to drop $136 Billion in mere minutes.

It boggles the mind and makes one try to find some sense in it. What does it mean?

Well, it certainly proved the tremendous reliance we all have on the content that comes from Twitter. Some would say investors rely too much on automated trades based on tweets.

It also proved the great value our society places on Twitter as a provider of content and information.

Tweets will now be featured in Yahoo’s news feed.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that it was taking Twitter very seriously indeed.

In her blog, Merissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo stated, “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to ing Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed.”

She went on to say that over the next few days users would begin to see Tweets “personalized to their interests and preferences” appear in their content stream, delivering on earlier promises that the search and new aggregation giant would move toward more personalization of content for its users.

Yahoo’s big search competitor, Google wasn’t able to keep its former relationship with the microblogging giant. Twitter results disappeared from Google some time back, making this an quite a win for Yahoo.

See full story on business2community.com

In Japan, Twitter is As Big as Facebook

twitter japan

Japan Twitter uses rivals Facebook in size

 

Jim Dougherty Contributing Writer

A report from globalwebindex this week showed that Twitter is nearly as popular as Facebook in Japan. I really don’t know what to make of this information, but here is a table describing the popularity of social networks in Japan.

While this is an interesting development, Twitter’s Japanese popularity reminded me of the 1984 international hit song “Big in Japan” by German synth-pop group Alphaville. The song itself is a tribute to the British band, Big in Japan which featured band members from the KLF, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but it seems as good a song as any to celeate Twitter’s success in the land of the rising sun. You might have thought otherwise, but “Big in Japan” was Alphaville’s greatest international hit, although their song “Forever Young” was covered by Laura Branigan and sampled by Jay-Z, in addition to being a staple of high school dances in the mid-eighties (although my personal favorite was Flock of Seagulls “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)”).

(If big production isn’t your thing, check out this version of the song from Hungarian Idol):

BioTwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedInLatest PostsJim DoughertyWriter and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.comI aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.@jimdoughertyWriter about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdoughertyJim Dougherty+Jim DoughertyLatest posts by Jim Dougherty (see all)Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed – May 19, 2013Report: Twitter is big in Japan (Facebook big) – May 19, 2013Infographic: Is the value of Foursquare overstated? – May 18, 2013Infographic: Size isn’t everything when it comes to social platforms – May 18, 2013Infographic: Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and G+ – May 17, 2013

BioTwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedInLatest PostsJim DoughertyWriter and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.comI aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.@jimdoughertyWriter about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdoughertyJim Dougherty+Jim DoughertyLatest posts by Jim Dougherty (see all)Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed – May 19, 2013Report: Twitter is big in Japan (Facebook big) – May 19, 2013Infographic: Is the value of Foursquare overstated? – May 18, 2013Infographic: Size isn’t everything when it comes to social platforms – May 18, 2013Infographic: Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and G+ – May 17, 2013

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Infographic: How to optimize photos for Facebook’s News Feed http://t.co/6OkhbTRkb0 – 1 hour agoFollow @jimdougherty

See full story on leaderswest.com