Millennials are coming on strong and marketers are taking note. Reaching this new generation is easier than any other in history because of their engagement in online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Digg. The big question is: how are millennials influenced about purchasing habits via their social graph. BazaarVoice set out to answer this question and subsequently published this infographic on their findings:
A recent release from ComScore shows where Facebook users spend their time. This is a valuable insight for digital marketers trying to understand what areas of Facebook hold the best potential.
What this chart shows is that Facebook is driven by profile stalking and browsing photo albums. Those two activities account for 48% of all our time on Facebook. The one insight this chart doesn’t show is whether users are browsing their friends profiles or brand pages. That piece of knowledge would have dramatically increased the value of this data set.
Another insight that popped out at me is just how much time is not spent on apps. You often hear about Farmville addicts and the social gaming element of Facebook, but it really doesn’t account for much on a macro scale. Some businesses are raging over the belief they need Facebook apps for their business. For some that may be true, but it’s not such a ground swell that every company needs that presence. If your managing your Facebook page effectively and using photos to engage your followers, you’re likely reaching a majority of your Facebook fans.
What do you think? Are you surprised by this data? Tell me in the comments below!
Who doesn’t love a good infographic, right? I found this the other day and I just have to share it with my followers. It looks at best practices for startups on how to leverage social media. Great information for any rookie marketer cramped in a smelly apartment at a startup. Do you think the practices described are good tips to implement? Tell me why or why not in the comments down below!
(Click Photo to enlarge)
Many people struggle finding value in Twitter. I’m about to tell you how Twitter landed an elderly couple in Wisconsin a multi-thousand dollar contract to provide catering services to a telecomm corporation.
In June of 2011, I started a local food blog where friends and I review local restaurants. The site has grown steadily now receiving hundreds of visits per day from people looking for restaurant information in a metro area of 100,000 residents. We have spent zero dollars on advertising. Our launch strategy was a guerrilla chalking campaign around the city. Today we have over 200 quality followers on our social platforms and many more finding us via Google. As our following and credibility have increased, so have our opportunities to exert real influence.
We received a tweet from an executive of Midwestern telecommunications company. He asked us a simple question:
“We need a company that can provide 500 bratwursts and grill them. Recommendations?”
Being the foodie I am, I knew of a great catering company. Within minutes of receiving the tweet I called up Bob’s Catering and asked if they could accommodate this request. He said yes and I told them to expect a call that day from the customer.
I tweeted back to this executive within 15 minutes:
“Bob’s Catering in Hatley. Great food and great pricing. Highly recommend.”
I called Bob, said they could handle it. Told him to expect your call. Bobscatering.net
Within a couple hours I get another tweet stating they booked Bob’s Catering while thanking me for the recommendation. This is a perfect example of how business is changing today.
Bob’s Catering didn’t spend thousands on billboards, newspaper ads or radio time. They rely on word of mouth and their reputation builds with each customer they provide superior service to. Bob’s cook some mean food and provide old-school service like their parents taught them to do. The owners of Bob’s Catering is an elderly couple in their 70′s. They never even heard of Twitter in all likelihood, yet that’s what brought them in a large contract in the off-season.
Companies and individuals are relying more on user recommendations and online reviews more than costly mass-advertising campaigns. This story is a perfect example.
Is your company monitoring bloggers, review sites or Twitter? Being active in the online communities that matter to your business a must these days.
We are living in unprecedented times here in the United States of America. A revolution seems to be stirring across the country all fueled by the occupation of Wall Street. It all started when a small group of students decided to pitch tents on Wall Street in disgust to corporate greed and the 2oo8 collapse of the economy. The occupation went largely ignored by mainstream media for the first week, only to be picked up when large amounts arrests and alleged incidents of civil rights violations began leaking out. How can these protests gain so much national steam when corporate media largely ignore them? Quite simply, the Internet.
You may have seen this YouTube video floating around Facebook or your e-mail inbox in early September.
That is one thing you won’t see attributed in the media, it’s the group known as “Anonymous” that really can be credited with starting this groundswell. They used social media, chat rooms and simple e-mail to alert the public to their intent and encouraged others to join. Two weeks later and look where it’s at now.
Here is map showing Occupy Facebook groups and pages. The red dots represent pages and the green groups. The larger the dot, the more people follow that particular page/group.
Click to Enlarge
It will continue to spread even faster now that MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews and others have devoted large amounts of airtime to the movement. Facebook is the main method of organization with Twitter fueling the real-time information push across large occupation areas. Checking out the @OccupyWallSt page, I noticed many messages discussing rumors and information that was filtering through word of mouth.
The biggest challenge the movement will face is information overload. When everyone has a voice, it’s very… democratic. The noise factor will increase ten-fold and the chance for misinformation increases drastically. Those are the challenges, but I shouldn’t need to tell you the positives of giving everyone a voice in the crowd. You have to take the bad with the good. It remains to be seen if communication begins to get filtered to a central location at these occupations; my gut tells me this will not happen. Whomever is in control of the Facebook and Twitter presence of any occupation wields an enormous amount of influence and power.
This is what the modern day newsroom looks like. It’s no longer Versace suits and $10,000 workstations. It’s college students and other young people with their $500 laptops and a pot of coffee. What is truly amazing is that this strikes fear into Rupert Murdoch and other media millionaires. They no longer dictate what gets attention and what doesn’t. Less than 20 young people organized a national movement and forced the corporate media to pay attention, a bit of role reversal you could say. But that is what makes this movement so unique and never before seen in the United States.
Not until now have we seen young people organize and use their Internet savviness to do it. We’ve seen small-scale versions similar to this, but nothing on a national scale. The young people who fuel the activism and organization are digital natives. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube while all new this past decade is like second nature to these 20-somethings. If the barons on Wall Street need one more thing to keep them up at night, the generation currently in our K-12 system utilize the Internet better and are more savvy than us. These digitally driven revolutions will not be slowing anytime soon. The only threat to this in the long term is the government trying to regulate the Internet and wielding their control over the bits and bytes flowing freely from network-to-network.
Grab a magnifying glass (computer) and watch the revolution, you’ll only see bits and pieces on network television or your local newspaper. Download, stream, tune in and watch it unfold in real-time online. The place where it all started.
Small towns and social media. It’s almost like saying pickles and vanilla frosting. Small towns and cities like Wausau are often late to the game when it comes to emerging technologies. It’s not purely because people don’t care about these new technologies in smaller cities. There are other contributing factors that play a role in the slow growth of social media technologies in these areas.
Early adopters is what drives new technologies. I consider myself an early adopter. I have to use the latest hardware, and I want to be the first alpha tester for a new web start-up company. Early adopters love to be the first to embrace the vision of entrepreneurs. Bigger cities tend to have more early adopters, especially areas like San Francisco and New York City who have thriving technology sectors.
These early adopters lay the foundation for things like Foursquare, the popular geo-location awareness application. When the application begins to hit mainstream much of the user-generated content is in place already. There is a small but avid community already showcasing the value of such a technology and that makes it easier for less experienced users to see that value. In cities like Wausau, it’s simply not the case. Users join, there is limited activity and it’s hard to draw value when the value is in the network and content itself, and it takes users to generate that content. So therein lies the problem.
There are many useful technologies being leveraged in larger cities with some terrific results.
Foursquare
You may be using Foursquare or have at least tried it! 2010 has truly been the year of location technologies and it continues to evolve at hyper speed. Why do you want to use Foursquare or any other geo-location aware application? Let me indulge you.
Do you recall Robocop? Yea, you know who I’m talking about. The semi-robot, yet semi-human police officer that could scan anything and get loads of data just by looking at something. That is what location awareness is bringing to the table. It is making users more aware of their surroundings and able to get information in the form of “Tips” about various physical locations. This is the first baby step in adding a digital layer over real world objects so we can get data off the Internet about people or things in our lives. Google is working on a similar technology called Google Goggles, but we’ll leave that for another blog post.
What You’ll Need
Foursquare enables users to” check-in” via their mobile phone into a location. For instance, I recently popped into Polito’s pizza in downtown Wausau this summer. Upon checking into Polito’s, Foursquare alerted me that one of my friends, Dino, had left a tip for a restaurant nearby.
A week later I stopped into Chang Garden and had the Volcano Shrimp, which was awesome by the way! Are you starting to see where the value of Foursquare is? I had never been to Chang Garden before. I probably would have never stopped to eat there if it weren’t for the tip from Dino. Now I stop in every time I’m home. There is immense value within your network. Tap it!
Check out http://www.foursquare.com and watch this video for a better explanation of the service.
The ol’ tired saying about Twitter, “Why do people care what color shirt I’m wearing today, or what I had for breakfast?” Twitter has struggled with this question since they launched in 2006. People just didn’t get it. Over time as the micro-blogging service rode the technology hype cycle it finally gained it’s identity and purpose in the online environment. Twitter is the Internets life blood regarding what’s happening right now. I’ve read about so many major news stories on Twitter rather than on CNN or the local news.
I identify with this expression I’ve seen on Twitter for many months now. Facebook is for people you went to school with, Twitter is for the people you wish you went to school with. It’s not all about your cereal choice this morning or that your feeling sad on a particular day. There is much more value on Twitter.
You like dogs. You have three beautiful chocolate labs and love everything dog related. You join Twitter and your new username is @Joeycdog. You stare at your new profile and wonder, now what? Well be sure to make your avatar/profile photo on Twitter is of you, preferably a head shot or some kind of chest-up close up. It gives your tweets a more personal and engaging feel. Think about playing around with a custom background, maybe of your chocolate labs?
Now you’ll want to find the conversations going on about chocolate labs and dogs on Twitter. There are hundreds if not thousands of dog lovers just like yourself. Find those conversations and position yourself in that network of dog lovers. Too find some conversations and users, check out http://search.twitter.com and start searching keywords and phrases. Don’t be afraid to reply to total strangers. Social media has a requirement for it to be valuable; be social!
As you build your network, it becomes more valuable with each addition you make. Suddenly your Twitter feed is full of useful information about chocolate labs, the latest chocolate lab news and funny dog quotes. You follow some of the regions top dog breeders, professional handlers and many people just like yourself who have raised chocolate labs their entire life.
Now your chocolate lab Suzy is sick and not feeling well. You think she got into some chemicals in the kitchen. You tweet a photo of Suzy and say she’s not well and may have found some cleaner. Now within minutes your network of dog experts and owners are tweeting you how to handle the situation.
Twitter can be used from your laptop or desktop computer but it also widely available on smart phones like the iPhone, various Android phones and Blackberry.
Build your network and make it valuable! Learn more about Twitter by checking out this video.
There are literally thousands of new technological services like Foursquare and Twitter out there. You could drown yourself in new ways to communicate online with various networks. Don’t burn yourself out on trying every app you find on your iPhone. Leave that to us tech geeks. We try out every new app or service and determine whether it’s worthy of publicizing. It’s been bouncing around tech nerds for many months before you see it featured in CNN or the Wausau Daily Herald. Two services that should be featured are the two I’ve discussed above. Get in and join!
If you haven’t heard this meme yet, you might want to check your pulse: “He’s climbin’ in yo windows, he’s snatchin’ yo people up” or “So you can run and tell dat, homeboy”. These are the words of Antoine Dodson of Huntsville, Alabama. His sister was recently attacked in a attempted rape and WAFF-TV covered the story like any other. Reports are now sprouting that some local African American residents are upset that this story even made it to air. They believe it contained some kind of racial undertones that really smeared their local community to the country, and even the world.
Antoine is allowed the right to speak out, and media coverage could help catch his sisters attacker. Media is a tool often employed by law enforcement when they want the communities help in catching an offender. Why should it matter what color skin the victim has or what neighborhood it’s located in?
The news story was such a viral hit, it even has an autotune remix version that is tearing up the YouTube charts.
So how is the meme trending? Let’s examine.
The point of the story is you can’t control the media, especially how it reflects on your community. The media has a journalistic responsibility to cover stories, no matter how damaging they can possibly be. However, journalistic integrity and sensitivity should reflect the story in the best way possible, but this can sometimes be clouded in the pursuit of ratings in competitive markets.
This story was a valid one with a purpose, to raise awareness about the crime and bring a criminal to justice. Could WAFF-TV edited the footage to portray Antoine in a more favorable light? Could they have had the reporter focus him more and get his point across in a slightly less animated fashion? Perhaps. You have to take the good with the bad when it comes to mainstream media. It was a traumatic event and if it was your sister, I bed your “Antoine” side would come out as well. So, run and tell dat, HOMEBOY!
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