Notable from a learning and development perspective is that:

…social networking is largely viewed as a way to connect with friends, not co-workers or business partners.

Only 20 per cent use social networking platforms to communicate with colleagues.

Only 9 per cent use social networking platforms to make new business contacts

And only 6 per cent report using social networking for professional development. (RN)

Study: 43% of Online Americans Addicted to Social Networking | The Steve Rubel Stream | Steve Rubel |

posted by Richard Nantel

Of those companies that have some semblance of a social media strategy, 94% say that marketing activities are included in the plan; 71% said public relations were factored into the equation; and 55% say that they use social media for sales-related activities.

“It’s fairly well established that social media is a channel that businesses must participate in, leaving CEOs with the new challenge of planning and implementing brand aligned initiatives enterprise-wide,” said Veronica Fielding, president and CEO of Digital Brand Expressions.

Even for the firms that do have a strategic plan in place, only 29% reported distributing policies and/or communications protocols to employees via social channels. “This leaves the majority of organizations exposed to problems arising from employees saying the wrong things in the wrong ways to the wrong people at the wrong time,” according to the report.

Meanwhile, most companies appear to be shooting from the hip, with no cohesive game plan or measurement systems in place. Even among those with a plan, few have written policies and communications protocols in place, leaving the organization exposed to problems arising out of employees communicating in ways that inadvertently hurt — rather than help — their company brands.

Among those companies that are presently executing social media plans, 69% have set up metrics/tracking methods to measure ROI of such activities, while 71% plan for ongoing monitoring of brand reputation across the social media landscape.

Another 71% claim to be preparing and distributing protocols and policies for ongoing communications, including how to respond to positive/negative comments on social media Web sites.

Also of note, the majority — 74% — of respondents said their marketing departments should be responsible for the creation and maintenance of all strategic social media plans. About half — 51% — said their corporate communications team should be in charge of such efforts, while 28% said their executive team should lead all social efforts.

Of the 100 companies that DBE surveyed in May, the majority — 49% — were made up of less than 50 employees; 32% had 50-999 employees; and 19% were made up of more than 1,000 employees.

by Gavin O’Malley, on Media Post June 22, 2010

While no one can confirm when — or if — Facebook might surpass Google as the top source for traffic to brand Web sites, recent data from Compete suggests the social network has surpassed Google when it comes to sending more people to content portals, such as MSN and Yahoo.

The referrals are not necessarily done through links or widgets, but by typing in a new URL in the browser. So, the real question becomes: what do people see on Facebook that drives them directly to portals such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo? Some marketers might suggest paid-search ads, friendly chatter, Fan pages and widgets influence consumers.

No matter what drives the traffic from Facebook to portals, the findings make Facebook the No. 1 referrer with 14.80% market share in January — up from 13.04% in December, according to Compete.

EBay follows, contributing 7.27% in January; google.com, 7.24%; myspace, 3.01%; craigslist.org, 1.84%; youtube.com, 1.23%; microsoft.com, 1.16%; comcast.net, 0.84%; and monster.com, 0.46%.

“The data analyzes cross visitation between Facebook and content portals,” says Jessica Ong, director of online media and search at Compete. “As Facebook continues to grow, it will cross paths with some of the larger sites like portals. That’s why we see Facebook sending more traffic to the portal category of Web sites.”

Facebook’s growth catapulted the social network past Yahoo to become the No. 2 online site in January 2010, with about 133 million unique visitors, just under Google’s 147 million unique visitors. Facebook experienced 121.41% growth in December 2009 compared with the prior year, according to the research firm.

Ong points to Yahoo’s redesigned home page that supports a “My Favorites” section down the left rail where people can add content, including Facebook. She says that’s another factor driving cross-visitation between Facebook and Yahoo.

Evidently, Google recognizes this, too. Google recently listed Facebook as a competitor in its annual 10K U.S. Security and Exchange Commission filing, according to Search Engine Land.

Measuring traffic from friends’ posts to portals and Web sites has been difficult, according to Ong. “Compete is trying to figure that out based on our data, but Facebook probably can,” she says. “We have had many requests for that data.”

Originally Posted on Media Post by Laurie Sullivan

We talk a lot about the rapid adoption of social media in a wide array of industries. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.

While the survey results are great in that they indicate an enhanced role social media in many industries, it also indicated that some professionals or companies are adopting social technologies without having a way to actually measure how effective or useful the measures actually are. In fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs.

Even less encouraging, more than 40% of respondents said they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools. This is worrisome because it indicates that industries and professionals are adopting technology without actually taking into account how it will impact their business and what value it will add.

It’s easy to say, “social media will improve customer retention” — and in fact that might be true for a number of businesses, but without proper ways to measure how these tools work, making them more effective and efficient becomes difficult. Moreover, without having an ROI strategy in place, businesses might be more willing to drop social technologies or treat them as a short-term fad. For social media and social technology to really work, businesses need to be able to measure its impact, positive and negative.

How do you or your businesses monitor your social media ROI? If you don’t measure your ROI from social media, why not?

[Photo Courtesy of Make Us Smile Tees]

Originally posted on Mashable

“It’s not rocket surgery.”

That malapropism became a bit of a mantra at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and built trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

So why is it so difficult for so many companies to successfully integrate social media? I dug through my (30 pages of) notes to try and find some themes in what the speakers shared and came up with a this list of why organizations might be getting hung up.

1. They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products

Chris Brogan shared how Citrix Online created the Workshifting community to address the rise of telecommuting and remote work. Sure, it ties in with Citrix’s GoToMeeting/Webinar/PC product line, but the blog isn’t a commercial for its products. The same holds true for Kodak’s photography blog that Chief BloggerJenny Cisney talked about. It’s about photography and creativity in general, not about Kodak cameras. Greg Matthews shared how Humana developed the Freewheelin bicycle sharing communities with plenty of online and “real life” components to the program. Bicycles don’t have much to do with health insurance specifically, but they are about being healthy. If a company is only talking online about its specific products and not looking for ways to connect to the bigger picture, it’s pretty difficult for people to be engaged.

2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action

If you’re going to listen to your customers, you’d better be ready to do something about what you hear.Valeria Maltoni noted that if a company creates an online presence that’s open and allows customer feedback, it creates the expectation that the company is going to do something with that feedback. Worse than not being heard is being heard and then ignored. Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines shared how a simple blog post stating the airline was considering assigned seating amassed tons of customer comments showing a lack of support for the idea. This feedback changed the direction of their internal debate and led to a new boarding procedure that maintained the open seating arrangement.

3. They aren’t calibrated internally with the technology

Jason Falls chastised corporate Web sites for being little more than online brochures. Customers expect interaction. Content creation is key to social media success, and every company should have a Web site with a content management system that allows for quick, easy content creation without the IT department needing to recode a Web site. Anyone in the organization should be able to publish via a CMS. And companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees.

4. They’re not framing risk accurately

Dharmesh Shah reminded us all that a corporate blog has never been fatal to an organization. NBC cameraman Jim Long said the often a company’s entry into social media is a clumsy, shotgun blast and that there’s an equal chance of looking foolish by having a ham-fisted marketing department launch a social media presence as there is if a rogue employee “goes off” on Twitter. The risk of social media is not abated by not participating. And really, while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company.

5. Their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success

In Shiv Singh’s presentation, he discussed how the customer should be at the core of the brand. When policies, procedures, products and processes become more important than the customer, there’s no way social media efforts can be effective. When your employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for your brand. Yes, Zappos was cited time and again as a case study, but largely because it has a culture that makes social media work. All of its employees are focused on customer service at the core. The same holds true for Southwest Airlines.

I could go on and on. So many of the speakers at IMS shared great examples of simple, effective social media strategies that have humanized organizations and allowed them to build better relationships with customers. But time and again companies are either rejecting social media or participating in a way that defeats the purpose.

It’s not rocket surgery.

Original post by AmeyMengel.com

Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.markappeal.com/create/35/feed 0 http://www.markappeal.com/create/6 http://www.markappeal.com/create/6#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:40:15 +0000 Mark E. Ting http://www.markappeal.com/?p=6 WANT MORE CUSTOMERS but BUSY TOO SERVING YOUR CURRENT ONES?

KNOW THAT SOCIAL MEDIA CAN TAKE YOU TO THE NEXT LEVEL BUT TOO SWAMPED TO FIGURE IT OUT?

Let me guess, you recognize that social media is important but you don’t know what to do get started or you have a Twitter and Facebook account but now you are asking ~ NOW WHAT? Social media is growing so fast that managing a complete digital footprint (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Youtube, Flickr etc… ) for your business can be a FULL TIME job and drive you crazy if you don’t really know what to do.

MARK E. TING SOLVES ALL THOSE PROBLEMS!

We are currently offering a Social Media Marketing Stimulus Package for 50% off of our normal price. We will design and manage a comprehensive branded digital footprint in the socialmediasphere for $199.97

$99.97 a month

Including: Facebook, Twitter, Linked In , Flickr, Youtube, Website, Google and more…

Want to tie it all to your website or blog? You can even throw that in for just additional

$99.97 a month.

We will design you a custom branded digital footprint in several social media platforms that pertain to your particular market and then help you maintain them all to ensure a consistent message goes across all of them.

And we do ALL of this for only $99.97

$99.97 a month.

Add your blog/website for just $399.99

$199.97 a month.

NO CONTRACTS ~ NO HASSLE ~ NO GIMMICKS

Just results.

Examples of our work…

Channel Huntsville ~ Digital Footprint

• Web ~ http://www.channelhuntsville.com
• Facebook ~ http://www.facebook.com/channelhuntsville
• Twitter ~ http://www.twitter.com/huntsvegas
• Linked In ~ http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=103347
• Plurk ~ http://www.plurk.com/huntsvegas
• Flickr ~ http://www.flickr.com/groups/huntsvegas/
• Youtube ~ http://www.youtube.com/channelhuntsville

We are so sure you will satisfied with our service that if you are not happy, just let us know and if we can’t make it right you we will give you all the branding that we did in each network profile

AT NO EXTRA CHARGE.

A little voice telling you this is tooooo good to be true!

Tell it to shut up and give us a call today!

Thanks again for your consideration

Ryan E. Poole
Social Media Mavin @ The Mark E. Ting Company

mark@markappeal.com
(256) 763.0049

P.S. Ask me how you can get these services for FREE!