Las Vegas: Radio Show Host Warren Whitlock, publisher of this blog and others has been named a “Forbes top 10 social media power influencer”
Radio Show Host Warren Whitlock
Whitlock, active online for the last 32 years, best-selling author, speaker and serial entrepreneur in publishing, advertising and marketing consulting and more commented “I am always happy to be acknowledged by these lists. None of these accolades suggest that there’s some competition and a winner but it’s nice to be included with colleagues that I know are helping business take advantage of the revolution in marketing that we currently call social media
“Social media tools that we have today have helped to enable a change from the 20th-century model of doing business where a centralized organization could push out a marketing message to the masses, limited only by the large budgets it took to communicate one way
“thanks to the Internet and especially these tools, consumers have the expectation that communications will be two-way conversations. Those businesses that learn to implement this in every part of their business will see their best years ever while those who continue to try to control a message and push consumers into old models will go downhill.”
Radio Show Host
Whitlock is the author of two best-selling books on social media, including the first book about Twitter and mobile marketing “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing are Changing the Way We Do Business” and “Profitable Social Media: Business Results without Playing Games”
Once I got my email inbox organized, I found that it’s the best place to get regular information and marketing opportunities.
I’m now adding tools like the ones show here and each day find marketing opportunities coming to me.
Marketing Opporunites Sent to Your Inbox
Are you tired of checking multiple analytics accounts, social networks, ranking monitors, and other tools on a daily basis? Whether you are a small business owner trying to run your business, a marketer managing several client accounts, or anyone looking to increase efficiency and productivity, you will want to try out the following tools that…
Are you tired of checking multiple analytics accounts, social networks, ranking monitors, and other tools on a daily basis? Whether you are a small business owner trying to run your business, a marketer managing several client accounts, or anyone looking to increase efficiency and productivity, you will want to try out the following tools that will deliver your online marketing updates straight to your inbox.
One of the easiest ways to monitor mentions across the web for your business, your clients, or your competitors is by setting up alerts. Google Alerts will send you email whenever a new page on the web with the keywords you are monitoring appears.
Talkwalker Alerts is a similar service if you would rather use something other than Google, considering Google’s history of shutting down their products. While Google hasn’t announced the end of Google Alerts, they are shutting down Google Reader, a product that was tied directly into Google Alerts RSS subscription options.
Whether you are managing one website or multiple websites, yourself or your clients, it’s tough to keep up with all of the new followers, friends, updates, mentions, etc. across multiple social media accounts along with your analytics.
SocialReport.com connects all of your social media information and analytics in one place. Best of all, you’ll receive a daily email with a summary of all your activity. This includes your new Twitter followers (along with their bios), Twitter mentions, LinkedIn connections, LinkedIn company page and group activity, Google+ activity, Klout, YouTube activity, and Google Analytics.
People who sell through Shopify, Ebay, and Etsy can also connect to those accounts to monitor their sales activity. Everything is organized by project, which makes it easy to manage multiple websites and related accounts. When you log in to your tool, you will get even more details about all of your account activity in individual reports and summarized in a graph so you can see if a spike in Twitter activity also results in a spike in website traffic.
There are certain types of activity that you might want to get notified about immediately, such as activity on your Facebook page. A part of beating the EdgeRank algorithm is to encourage engagement, and the faster you respond to comments on your wall posts or pages, the more discussion will happen.
AgoraPulse is a Facebook CRM tool that allows you to monitor your Facebook page analytics, updates, and competitors. They send you emails in real time when your Facebook page receives a new post, comment, or other update.
Getting immediate updates can also help you respond to reputation management issues, such as negative comments, as quickly as possible to diffuse a bad situation. It can also help you monitor your Facebook pages for spam comments and have those removed (and the users banned).
See full story on iacquire.com
Here’s a post by my friend Jeremiah Owyang about social business.
When I first saw the tweet about it. I asked “how can you be social without collaboration?”… I had my usual problem with the terms we invent. However, Jeremiah is a real though leader, he defines the trends he sees and I admire how he takes the risk of naming these things.
Social business IS business. Collaboration IS the essence of life. (We make connection and we share stories). Looking past the semantics, I read the article and the chart at the end of his post. He’s got the trend right.
What’s next?
Above Image: Market Opportunities for the Collaborative Economy by Vertical, from Sharable Magazine
Social Business is the Collaborative Economy
What’s the next phase of Social Business? That’s the question I’m frequently asked. Without a doubt, the next phase is the Collaborative Economy.
What’s that? That’s where ands will rent, lend, provide subscriptions to products and services to customers, or even further, allow customers to lend, trade, or gift anded products or services to each other. This unstoppable trend is fueled by the social web, the specific features include relationships, online profiles, reputations, expressed needs and offerings and ecommerce. Customers are already starting to conduct these behaviors among themselves using TaskRabbit, AirBnb, Lyft, and many others tools –some of these are disruptions and opportunities to ands.
[The next phase of Social Business is the Collaborative Economy; Brands will enable customers to share, trade, lend, gift products and goods using social technologies]
While this movement will have oader global and economic impacts, at Altimeter, we’re focused on disruptions to corporations. We’re knee deep in interviews for our next report on the Collaborative Economy, and have interviewed startups, VCs, ands, social business software vendors, authors, thought leaders, and are dissecting data of 200 sharing startups, for a oad overview of what it means to business.
Matrix: Phases of Social Business
Caveat: There are many oader impacts inside of the company that also impact HR, recruiting, supply chain, IT, and more, the above is just a sample of the most well discussed impacts.Brands Already On Board: Toyota, Barclays Card, Avis, BMW, WalmartWhat are examples of companies that are already taking advantage of this new social business trend now? Here’s a few from the Master List of Brands Participating in the Collaborative Economy: To stay current with car sharing or lending services like Lyft, RelayRide, Zipcar, Uber and more Toyota, OnStar and BMW are allowing cars to be rented. Barclays Card sponsored and supported bicycle sharing in the city of London, associating their and with the movement. And retail giant Walmart is considering allowing customers to deliver goods to each other, to compete with Taskrabbit and Amazon.
[The first phase of Social Business impacted anding and PR, it shifted to support and product development.The next phase impacts core business model]
Mindset Change Required in CorporationsSo there you have it, the next phase of Social Business goes beyond marketing and customer support, it changes the fundamental business models and relationships that we will have with our customers. The big change that ands will struggle with, as is it means that ands will have to care about the relationship between customers as they trade and rent your products between themselves.
See full story on web-strategist.com
This Linkedin Infographic has been one of the most popular feature here.
When we see an update, we’ll update this post so you know it’s the latest Linked Infographic
Beyond the LinkedIn Infographic
- The site officially launched on May 5, 2003. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network.
- The company is publicly held and has a diversified business model with revenues coming from talent solutions, marketing solutions and premium subscription products.
- Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., LinkedIn also has U.S. offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Omaha and San Francisco. International LinkedIn offices are located in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New Delhi, Paris, Perth, São Paulo, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.
- LinkedIn is currently available in nineteen languages: English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
- LinkedIn has 3,779 full-time employees located around the world. LinkedIn started off 2012 with about 2,100 full-time employees worldwide, up from around 1,000 at the beginning of 2011 and about 500 at the beginning of 2010.
Worldwide Membership
- LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 225 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
- Professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second.
- Sixty-four percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the United States.
- There are over 30 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn. They are LinkedIn’s fastest-growing demographic.
Membership by country
Regional membership
65M+ EMEA
50M+ Europe
39M+ Asia and the Pacific
6M+ Southeast Asia
3M+ DACH
Product Metrics
- LinkedIn counts executives from all 2012 Fortune 500 companies as members; its corporate talent solutions are used by 88 of the Fortune 100 companies.
- LinkedIn members did over 5.7 billion professionally-oriented searches on the platform in 2012.
- More than 2.9 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.
- There are more than 1.5 million unique publishers actively using the LinkedIn Share button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform.
- LinkedIn members are sharing insights and knowledge in more than 2.1 million LinkedIn Groups.
- In the first quarter of 2013, an average of 30 percent of unique visiting members came through mobile apps, versus just 19 percent a year ago.
Research shows that social media is using images and graphics even more than past reports. The following infographic show the effects of a visual twitter:
From AllTwitter
Did you know that more than one-third (36 percent) of all links shared on Twitter point to an image, but that as many as three-quarters (77 percent) of tweets that link to an image from a brand do not reference the brand by name?
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Coca-Cola, but soft drink brands are the least likely to be tagged by Twitter users who share photos of their products, followed by beer, luxury and sport brands.
However, you have to wonder: does that really matter? It certainly might be an issue if you’re a new business where every mention of your brand is essential to your growth, but Coca-Cola, Inc. is the absolute definition of a global marketing terminator. As for why, I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s famous quote:
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
So I’m not sure there’s much of a need for Coca-Cola to be tagged by Twitter fans who are sharing images of Coca-Cola products, nor do I think it matters all that much to the brand. But for a mom and pop business it absolutely does matter – visuals are processed up to 60,000 times faster than text, but potential new customers still need to know where to go to buy the products.
Check the infographic below for more detail on why images have become ubiquitous on Twitter.
I read a story about someone getting unfollowed on Twitter and couldn’t believe the fuss about Twitter unfollows.
Asking why someone unfollows you, or even just monitoring it seems like too much effort and not profitable, so for those worried about such things.. I give the following response:
There is way too much fuss over the etiquette of who “should” follow who. I think it comes off like Miss Manners telling people how many phone numbers should be in a address book.
Back in the early days when we were writing “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing are Changing the Way We Do Business” we saw two arguments going.
- “You’re a jerk if you don’t follow back”
- “No one could possibly follow more than 50 people”
There’s some logic in any approach one takes.. but it’s their business, not mine.
We ended up starting the book with the two words I still live by — NO RULES — who you follow and unfollow is your business. Who I follow is my business.
I have wasted a lot of time “trimming” my follow account. Above 100k, the most likely criticism is “you look like a spamer if you follow everyone” — I translate this a “YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE”
I took on the trimming project to see if I could get a more realist view of people. Now at 60k + I can’t see anything different than when it was 90K. Which seems obvious to me. I also can’t tell the difference from when I followed 3000. There’s way more tweets than I’ll ever see, and I read lists and mentions.
Still, I can easily respond to EVERY tweet with my name and probably could with triple the tweets. I have to occasionally filter out #FF tweets and other things with lists.. I’ve never seen the point of posting a list anyway (if I want to know who you think is a super BFF, I’ll just read your profile 🙂
My standard response for #FOLLOWMEBACKORIWILLCRY tweets is “I follow who I want” .. since they talked to me, I’ll probably follow them.. as I follow people who I have conversations with.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had numbers like “how many people you talk to” and “how many you’ve helped”
Follower counts don’t count.. the only number that matters it ONE.. the one person I’m in conversation with at any moment… the others are just “potential conversations”
Do you track Twitter Unfollows?
Share your thought in the comments.
It’s not enough to just set up a profile and expect wonderful things to start to happen, as if by magic. Twitter, like life, doesn’t work that way. You need to do the work, and you need to put in the hours.
And the good news?
Most of Twitter can be reduced to one basic requirement: show up. And then keep showing up. Be a presence. Let people know that you’re there, that you’re proactive, that you’re listening, that this isn’t a fad or a phase, and that you’re committed for the long run.
Bottom line? Keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to be on Twitter constantly, obsessing and talking about every little thing. In fact, that’s the worst thing you can do. It’s very much about balance. But that doesn’t mean the opposite is true. In fact, far from it: if you invest nothing into the network I can absolutely guarantee that you are going to get nothing back.
Don’t underestimate the value of being solid and dependable. If I can paraphrase Woody Allen for a moment, I’d say that’s 90% of what it takes to be successful on Twitter.
See full story on mediabistro.com
Social networking online is a great way to further your connections, and while some think it might be hurting the potential of meeting people face-to-face, the exact opposite is true.
We’ve talked about the tools we use in social media repair and follow-up with contacts met at events and conferences…
Here’s a fascinating story, a trip to Dublin where planning and focus ended up making it more profitable than you might imagine.
Social Networking with Small Events
From The Next Web
Paddy Cosgrave is no stranger to the tech conference scene. The driving force behind the Dublin Web Summit, he and his team are gearing up for another massive event this coming October. While the event itself is a year long preparation, Paddy has recently been spotted making appearances at much smaller, back-to-the-roots events, namely by way of the Pub Summit series.
The Pub Summit 100 event series is taking place in 40 countries across 5 continents over the course of 2013, all with a single focus – ing people together and provide them with the opportunity to socialize and grow their networks.
Vienna, Austria recently played host to a Pub Summit, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Paddy to discuss the roots of these events, what makes them special, why large conferences are still very important, and what and how conference and attendees can do to make the very most out of them.
“There are lots of different formats for meet-ups, and a lot of them are centered around content. But I feel that if you really want great content, you can just go on YouTube, and no matter who you’re looking to learn from, you can find a talk that they’ve done. Being lectured by a single person in a room of 100 people is a missed opportunity for those 100 people to mingle and meet each other. And the one thing we don’t do less and less of is spending time socializing with like minded people.”The rules of the Pub Summit series are simple: No pitching, a few words from the co-hosts, and no guest speakers.
“It’s booze, and good people. The Irish have been perfecting it for generations.”
When asked if these smaller type events should be the way of the future, eschewing massive conferences, Paddy comments, “Big isn’t necessarily better. A 5, 6, 7 thousand person Web Summit with 300 speakers, spread over three days, isn’t automatically a great experience. You’ve got to look at these people and recognize, what are the communities within that group. Bringing all of these people together is actually a great opportunity to create smaller spaces and sideline events. You’ve got iPhone designers, well why can’t they all go together for a eakfast? Why can’t there be dinners across the city hosted by curators of different communities? During the day, it’s a great opportunity to be inspired by great speakers in a huge auditorium. But on the periphery, you’ve got to create an ecosystem where you can go and meet individuals.”
See full story on thenextweb.com
Do you need a Twitter Cheat Sheet?
There are a many myths about engagement. Rules made up at cocktail parties and measurements that don’t allow for the one to one human connection that Twitter does best.
Dashburst reviewed a new Twitter Cheat Sheet. The facts are right, but before you implement them, let’s have a discussion here about how following them can hurt you
Are you getting the type of interaction and retweets you always hoped for on Twitter? Did you know you could basically double your engagement rates on Twitter just by including an image within your tweet? Or that using more than two hashtags or tweeting too much can significantly lower your interaction rates? Twitter is the fastest growing social network increasing by 40% over the last half of 2012. This makes it paramount for your business to master the intricacies of Twitter, which will help further raise awareness about your and and generate additional new leads.
So here are some great tips and tricks to help you increase engagement on Twitter like follower retweets, click-through rates (CTR) and replies.
First off, 78% of the engagement with a and is through retweets. As the number of tweets you send per day increases though, engagement will typically decrease. The other 22% of engagement with a brand’s tweets are from replies.
92% of the interaction with a brand’s tweets are by clicking links, but most businesses don’t realize that the engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday–only 19% of brands actually tweet during the weekend. Brands typically see 30% higher interaction rates tweeting from 8am to 7pm. Tweets that contain less than 100 characters also receive 17% higher engagement than longer tweets. So keep it short and sweet! Tweets that contain links receive 86% higher retweet rates than tweets without links. The bottom line is people are looking for you to provide them with links to relevant information.
Tweets with hashtags recieve 2X more engagement than those without hashtags, yet only 24% of measured tweets contain hashtags. Tweets with one or two hashtags have a 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags. However, tweets that use more than two hashtags actually show a 17% drop in engagement. So using hashtags can be effective, just don’t overdo it!
Tweets with image links have twice the engagement rates compared to tweets without images! Also, tweets that ask followers to “Retweet” recieve 12X higher retweet rates than those that do not. However, only less than 1% of ands implement this strategy. In fact, when followers are explicitly asked to and “Retweet” is spelled out, the retweet rate is 23X higher than the average. When using the shortened term “RT” instead, the retweet rate is only 10X higher.
See full story on dashburst.com
When asked to explain social media profit strategy, I often reply with two words. “listen” and “love”
Amanda Palmer uses another two words. “Just Ask”
The latter did make for an outstanding TED Talk and won accolades all over the net this week. If you haven’t seen it, I put the video here. I just watched it again. .. WOW!
Don’t make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.
Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn’t fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable — and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans.
Amanda’s story is great. I love how she learned to LISTEN. That’s very easy to practice when you spend five years professionally being quite.
Instead of pushing her music (message) on others, she found out what they wanted and saw that they got it. That’s what we call “LOVE”
Listen and love. It’s and easy as that.
Social Media Profit Strategy
When I work with clients, we do far more than talk about love. It’s serious business and we set up systems and KPI’s to measure attraction, retention and bottom line profits.
But let’s never forget. Today, more than ever, people are looking for a connection, real human to human contact and sharing of stories. This has always been what people look for in business and life.
In the 20th Century, it was easy to win with a big message blasted out using the most power you could find to millions of consumers who were lucky enough to have mass media for the first time and happy to sit through ads.
We always preferred a two way dialog. Thanks to the Internet and the technologies calls social media that’s possible. Some companies are learning to use what Amanda Palmer talked about, they listen to the their audience (prospects/customers) and do right by them (we say “love”)
Who Else is Using Love as a Strategy?
Most of those asking me for help in social media have one thing on their mind “How do I get this message out?”
We have the answer. We let the market know that our clients are ready to listen.
Do you have a social media profit story? Share below in the comments. I’m listening.
