Whether you plan to use social media for better PR outreach, marketing, or just listening to what customers have to say, the social media tools you use can play an important role in your business. What’s equally important is who uses those tools in your company’s name. Should you handle social media profiles yourself, or should you turn to a professional who can help you develop a solid social media strategy? [click to continue…]
Social media integration usually happens in stages and it often hinges on corporate culture. The idea of immersing a company into the social media world is intimidating. And of course you’re concerned about the time commitment and investment involved.
The good news is – most of these avenues of communication cost little or nothing. Yes, it will take time to find your rhythm in the social community. Don’t try to do everything, but do pick one outlet to use and utilize it well. When you’re comfortable, branch out a little further. Use the tips below to help you expand your social media presence. It is now easier than ever to communicate with your customers and fans. [click to continue…]
You’ve certainly seen at least one Old Spice Guy video by now. (And if you haven’t, get out from under your rock.) They have a thriving YouTube Channel and Twitter account. The company made waves with their social media campaign where the Old Spice Guy — actor Isaiah Mustafa — would create personalized response videos to questions received via social media outlets.
Old Spice Guy Commercial
My first thought was “why didn’t anyone think of this before?” But actually, it’s nothing new. Companies have been directly responding to tweets and such for a while now. But Old Spice did something different. They merged advertising and entertainment almost seamlessly, turning ads into both likeable content and real conversations.
Personally, I love the campaign. There aren’t many ads I can honestly say I enjoy, but theirs are up there. They make me laugh. I actually seek out the videos instead of having ads intrusively shoved in my face. And that, folks, is (or should be) the future of advertising. But will it get old? [click to continue…]
A few days ago freelance writer Laura Spencer (@TXWriter) tweeted a link to a Mashable post. The hyped up headline read “Facebook Now Controls 41% of Social Media Traffic.” Before I even read the post my gut screamed “Bullshit!” It often does that. My gut is rather talented at sniffing out shady statistics. It must be that past life in PR where we all learn that statistics can say just about anything we want them to if we twist them enough (my disgust of that attitude makes me hypersensitive to them now).
Then I did read the article. What I found was baffling (okay, it wasn’t really — it was about what I expected):
Charts with no reference points related to the supposed trends shown
Assumptions about people jumping from one site to another without any real evidence to back that up (and data charts right in the post that contradicted the claim)
Other statistical claims that didn’t jive with the “relative” charts shown in the post
Big social media sites being completely left out of the comparison
Whole niches of social media completely left out of the comparison
Sites that probably shouldn’t have been included but were
A huge social media site included in the first set of stats suddenly disappeared from later ones
Yikes. I bet you’re wondering why I haven’t linked you to the post yet. That’s because it seems to have gone “Poof!” Vanished into thin air it did. Because of that I won’t pull the actual charts to show you the problems (doesn’t seem right to publish their charts when they’ve pulled them — especially when it wasn’t even clear in the post if they belonged to Mashable or were Comscore charts taken somewhat out of context). However, I do want to highlight something from the cached version which illustrates my biggest problem of all: [click to continue…]
