911 Blog Reviews » Social Media

Ongoing List of Social Marketing Efforts from Vacation Destinations, Convention, and Tourism Bureaus

cgseo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:16:19 +0000

Above: A photo I took on a recent trip to North Shore Oahu, inline with my plans to fulfill operation bluewater . Recent data around interactive marketing spend indicates that the hospitality industry was ripe for spending on social marketing above all other industries. Why? This form of consumer marketing could be dependent on the human emotion and story telling between individuals, or through compelling word of mouth marketing campaigns. As a result, Christine Tran , Altimeter Researcher and myself are kicking off this list, and encourage you to add examples by leaving a comment. The scope for this is list is a tourist destination –not a hotel, airline, or specific restaurant. Bahamas Island Film Challenge, The Bahamas Tourist Office UK This video contest campaign encouraged filmmakers in the UK to submit videos with voting encouraged from the crowd. Caribbean, Caribbean Travel Organization(and islands) YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are present on the main site, but yet each of their other travel, blog, and other sites. See Carribean Travel , OneCarribean lists out various social properties, Antigua’s forums , and Aruba’s Facebook integration . Visit Dublin, Dublin Tourism Site has flickr, YouTube, podcasts and Twitter integration. They also sport a Facebook page. Hawaii’s GoHawaii, Stories of Hawaii Hawaii has used a variety of assets such as Facebook pages, Twitter, and even created a Pandora station, in the past, Hawaii has catered to a group of bloggers who spread the word to their readers on a blogger tour. Memphis Travel I recently met the wonderful head of social media, Kerry, at Memphis’s travel bureau on my travels, they have Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr account links on their site but haven’t yet integrated with their site. uwishuknew, Philadelphia Tourism Marketing An online source for an insider’s view of Philadelphia .” It’s a blog written by staff and local bloggers who are “in-the-know.” Here’s an example of their blog on dining . The Best Job in the World, Tourism Queensland You may have heard of the Best Job in the World campaign , a popular campaign garnering international media attention, and over 35,000 entries worldwide on youtube. The winner blogged about his entire experience . Ultimate Thailand Explorers, Tourism Authority of Thailand On the heels of the Best Job in the World, Thailand launched its own campaign. Contestants produced a 60-second YouTube video , and rallied for votes from their own existing social networks, effectively becoming destination ambassadors and spreading engagement. Do see the related blog . If you’ve got examples, please leave a comment below, with a description and URL, we’ll add.

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Ongoing List of Social Marketing Efforts from Vacation Destinations, Convention, and Tourism Bureaus

Facebook / McAfee deal provides security software but little education

cgseo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:36:34 +0000

In order to better secure its users, Facebook needs to stop them from making novice security mistakes in the first place. We need a board of security educators across all social networks.

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Facebook / McAfee deal provides security software but little education

Social media & B2B: Interactions are opportunities

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:43:53 +0000

Guest writer Rich Harris explores the tightrope walk of social media and B2B

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Social media & B2B: Interactions are opportunities

Getting Quick’n'Dirty with Hootsuite

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:51:06 +0000

It was hard coming back after a two-week break, but somehow Aaron and I pulled off a great show. At least we think so.

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Getting Quick’n'Dirty with Hootsuite

RevenFlo | Web Marketing Services » Blog Archive » Seminar on …

cgseo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:32:56 +0000

Web Marketing Services: Strategy, Management, Marketing, Consulting, Design, Development, Content Creation, Content Marketing, Search and Social Media Marketing.

Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:10:01 +0000

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon , Drillteam and StepChange . I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here’s my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph’s take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT . A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform I’ve heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I’ve also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn’t just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings. Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market: Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now’s a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here. Acquisition provides key services software platforms can’t fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group. Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it’ll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven’t made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy. Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors: Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships . This impacts other social agencies like Stage 2, Social Media Today, AdHoc, Ant’s Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value. Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms –not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use. This is competition for larger agencies –yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won’t get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don’t have in their portfolio. Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I’m excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

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Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

Social media RFP template, aka ‘snake oil detector’, separates strong from the weak

cgseo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:01:44 +0000

Simply put, if firms or consultants cannot complete this RFP, they probably shouldn’t be considered for hire

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Social media RFP template, aka ‘snake oil detector’, separates strong from the weak

Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

cgseo — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:00:06 +0000

The recession has been great for social marketing , in fact, I feel it’s spurred the industry on. With overall reduced marketing budgets, companies must innovate, and find new channels that are more efficient than the ‘carpet-bombing’ techniques of traditional marketing. There are a handful of goals that companies can have with social technologies, from learning, dialog, support, and innovation ( see Charlene’s deck, starting at slide 8 to learn more ), I want to drill down in the following matrix to focus on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral. I call this “Advocacy”. Marketers, who strive to find efficient ways of reaching customers at lower cost, seek ‘ force-multipliers ‘ or a method where using a small degree of energy (or the energy of another force) to your advantage. Do remember, there is a downside to any action, and with ‘advocacy’ there’s reduced control over message and therefore more risk. With that said, many marketers know the benefits of content spreading are worth the risks. Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing Sophistication and Description Investments and Returns Strengths: Weaknesses: Great For: Sharing Tools Baseline effort. Tools like Sharethis , AddThis , Gigya , and some features in Pluck , and Kickapps . High. Low investment as it can easily be deployed on CMS templates. Continual returns of content spreading with no additional overhead or cost. Easy to deploy, yet transactional Do not build deep relationship with customers Getting started, a baseline activity. Viral Marketing A basic technique. Word of mouth campaigns on Facebook apps, YouTube (see popular) , or Twitter (see moonfruit example) Low. Being able to hit the right elements of the content people want, timing, and other factors are difficult. Chances are, most campaigns that intend to be viral never are Easy for media and interactive agencies to create and deploy. Dime a dozen. Short term and cheap. Not conducive to building long term relationships. Traditional agencies and transactional marketers that are trying to learn social Social Network Connections An intermediate technique. Facebook, Twitter Connect. Easy to comment systems on blogs, to sophisicated Huffington Post social recommendations , see Buddy Media . Moderate to High. Allowing customers to login to your site with existing connections increase value of social sharing and chance to serve up contextual data. However there are considerable costs in creating contextual content and systems that are not yet mature. Encourages people to quickly login, share, and find others who have interests Challenges in collecting email leads as customers now ‘login’ using social connections. Static websites who need to inject social interactions. Advocacy Programs An advanced technique. Longer term programs with customer advocates like Microsoft MVP or Walmart’s 11 Mom’s High return but high cost. Companies can benefit from an unpaid army that will market, defend, and support customers, but this requires significant resources to launch, grow, and maintain. Builds long term deep relationships with a customer group that will defend brand. Requires full resources for program, takes time to build Companies that can’t scale their marketing in a high touch customer experience. Companies Should Embrace Advocacy Programs Organizations are already deploying these word of mouth tools, but often without a plan or strategy, get started now by: Deploy simple sharing features now. These cheap and easy to insert embeds should be on every content type where companies want the content to spread. From press releases, to blog posts, companies need to make it easy for their market to share with others. Reduce risks by providing proper support and resources . Organizations should first understand the costs, downsides and risks for each type of marketing program, with greater returns (Advocacy program) comes greater commitment of resources, and greater risk, so to reduce those risks, put the right resources behind it. Develop new measurement techniques. Measuring the spread of information is more difficult, as often companies won’t have web analytics installed on third party websites. Instead use a variety of mention and url tracking with brand monitoring software to track how far information spreads over time.

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Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

Gullibility of Facebook users continues to skyrocket in 2010

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:10:46 +0000

“Scam pages” leverage social engineering to take advantage of less than savvy social network users. Have you been fooled yet?

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Gullibility of Facebook users continues to skyrocket in 2010

Placing Bets On Social Strategy, SCRM, and Mobile in 2010

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:48:20 +0000

Above Image: Readers of this blog asked for coverage in Social CRM, Mobile Social Networks, and Community Platforms. This is in alignment with my goals for 2010. First of all, thanks to those who responded to the 2009 Web Strategy survey, the results were telling . One of the questions that I asked was about areas of focus, I’m pleased to hear that the direction readers want me to focus is in alignment with where I’m headed. It’s important to have goals, (even my personal goals to live in Hawaii 30 days a year like Operation Bluewater ) and I’m happy to share my focus for the coming year. Here’s my baseline topics that I’ve been blogging about, and helping clients through advisory and research, I’ve been doing this since I ran the social program at Hitachi, back in 2006, over four years ago. Organizational Social Readiness : 80% of a companies success is getting their organization ready through the right roles, processes, policies, measurement, only 20% should be on tools. I’ll continue to talk about organizational readiness. Social Strategy: This also ties into social marketing strategy, which should be focused first on socialgraphics (how your customers use these tools) and business goals –not reacting to the latest technology. Vendor and Technology Review: I’ll continue to cover the social networking space, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, as well as enterprise systems like Community Platforms like Jive, Lithium, Telligent, Awareness, Mzinga, Pluck, Eos, Salesforce Chatter. I make it a point in my career to always be uncomfortable: trying new things, looking at the upcoming changes and taking risks, I hope that by continuing to blog what I learn, we can grow together. The areas of increased focus for this year are: Social CRM: An organization’s response to the fleeting customer in the social space, and how companies must provide a holistic experience to customers by creating processes, integrating new channels, and responding to customers in near-real time. Why this space? Most companies don’t know they need it, but as customers increase their social behavior, tacking, managing, and responding will become increasingly difficult. I’ve already blogged some of my findings, read all the posts tagged ’social crm’ . Location based and Mobile Marketing: I place to distinct separations between these topics, although they are intrinsically tied. I’m placing bets on the increased marketing context that’s available by triangulating information through mobile and location devices. Similarly, I’ll continue to look at applications that extend to mobile devices –a natural extension to the social web. I’ve never put a lot of effort into the immature mobile space, but the adoption of these mini-computers are taking off, the space is slowly moving out of diapers and into adolescence. Read all my posts tagged ‘mobile’ . Now back to you: What topics and focuses will you have during this coming year? What areas of education are you planning to bolster up on? What will you practice and deliver? Wishing you a very successful 2010!

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Placing Bets On Social Strategy, SCRM, and Mobile in 2010